Re: [PATCH v4 0/5] fsnotify: fix softlockups iterating over d_subdirs

Jan Kara
2022-11-22T11:50:57Z

Hi Stephen!

On Fri 11-11-22 14:06:09, Stephen Brennan wrote:
> Here's my v4 patch series that aims to eliminate soft lockups when updating
> dentry flags in fsnotify. I've incorporated Jan's suggestion of simply
> allowing the flag to be lazily cleared in the fsnotify_parent() function,
> via Amir's patch. This allowed me to drop patch #2 from my previous series
> (fsnotify: Protect i_fsnotify_mask and child flags with inode rwsem). I
> replaced it with "fsnotify: require inode lock held during child flag
> update", patch #5 in this series. I also added "dnotify: move
> fsnotify_recalc_mask() outside spinlock" to address the sleep-during-atomic
> issues with dnotify.

Yes, the series is now much simpler. Thanks!

> Jan expressed concerns about lock ordering of the inode rwsem with the
> fsnotify group mutex. I built this with lockdep enabled (see below for the
> lock debugging .config section -- I'm not too familiar with lockdep so I
> wanted a sanity check). I ran all the fanotify, inotify, and dnotify tests
> I could find in LTP, with no lockdep splats to be found. I don't know that
> this can completely satisfy the concerns about lock ordering: I'm reading
> through the code to better understand the concern about "the removal of
> oneshot mark during modify event generation". But I'm encouraged by the
> LTP+lockdep results.

So I had a look and I think your patches could cause deadlock at least for
nfsd. The problem is with things like inotify IN_ONESHOT marks. They get
autodeleted as soon as they trigger. Thus e.g. fsnotify_mkdir() can trigger
IN_ONESHOT mark and goes on removing it by calling fsnotify_destroy_mark()
from inotify_handle_inode_event(). And nfsd calls e.g. fsnotify_mkdir()
while holding dir->i_rwsem held. So we have lock ordering like:

nfsd_mkdir()
inode_lock(dir);
...
__nfsd_mkdir(dir, ...)
fsnotify_mkdir(dir, dentry);
...
inotify_handle_inode_event()
...
fsnotify_destroy_mark()
fsnotify_group_lock(group)

So we have dir->i_rwsem > group->mark_mutex. But we also have callchains
like:

inotify_add_watch()
inotify_update_watch()
fsnotify_group_lock(group)
inotify_update_existing_watch()
...
fsnotify_recalc_mask()
inode_lock(dir); -> added by your series

which creates ordering group->mark_mutex > dir->i_rwsem.

It is even worse with dnotify which (even with your patches) ends up
calling fsnotify_recalc_mask() from dnotify_handle_event() so we have a
possibility of direct A->A deadlock. But I'd leave dnotify aside, I think
that can be massaged to not need to call fsnotify_recalc_mask()
(__fsnotify_recalc_mask() would be enough there).

Still I'm not 100% sure about a proper way out of this. The simplicity of
alias->d_subdirs iteration with i_rwsem held is compeling. We could mandate
that fsnotify hooks cannot be called with inode->i_rwsem held (and fixup
nfsd) but IMO that is pushing the complexity from the fsnotify core into
its users which is undesirable. Maybe we could grab inode->i_rwsem in those
places adding / removing notification marks before we grab
group->mark_mutex, just verify (with lockdep) that fsnotify_recalc_mask()
has the inode->i_rwsem held and be done with it? That pushes a bit of
complexity into the fsnotify backends but it is not too bad.
fsnotify_recalc_mask() gets only called by dnotify, inotify, and fanotify.
Amir?

> I originally wrote this series to make the last patch (#5) optional: if for
> some reason we didn't think it was necessary to hold the inode rwsem, then
> we could omit it -- the main penalty being the race condition described in
> the patch description. I tested without the last patch and LTP passed also
> with lockdep enabled, but of course when multiple tasks did an inotifywait
> on the same directory (with many negative dentries) only the first waited
> for the flag updates, the rest of the tasks immediately returned despite
> the flags not being ready.
>
> I agree with Amir that as long as the lock ordering is fine, we should keep
> patch #5. And if that's the case, I can reorder the series a bit to make it
> a bit more logical, and eliminate logic in
> fsnotify_update_children_dentry_flags() for handling d_move/cursor races,
> which I promptly delete later in the series.
>
> 1. fsnotify: clear PARENT_WATCHED flags lazily
> 2. fsnotify: Use d_find_any_alias to get dentry associated with inode
> 3. dnotify: move fsnotify_recalc_mask() outside spinlock
> 4. fsnotify: require inode lock held during child flag update
> 5. fsnotify: allow sleepable child flag update
>
> Thanks for continuing to read this series, I hope we're making progress
> toward a simpler way to fix these scaling issues!

Yeah, so I'd be for making sure i_rwsem is held where we need it first and
only after that add reschedule handling into
fsnotify_update_children_dentry_flags(). That makes the series more
logical.

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR