Re: VFS regression with 9pfs ("Lookup would have caused loop")

[asmadeus@codewreck.org]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote on Tue, Oct 15, 2024 at 08:07:10PM +0200:
> Thx for bringing this to my attention. I had hoped that Eric might reply
> and waited a bit, but that did not happen. I kind of expected that, as
> he seems to be  somewhat afk, as the last mail from him on lore is from
> mid-September; and in the weeks before that he did not post much either.
> Hmmm. :-/

Right, I had hoped he'd find time to look further into this and kept my
head in the ground, but it looks like we'll have to handle this somehow...

One note though he did sent a patch that seems related and wasn't sent
for merge:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAFkjPTn7JAbmKYASaeBNVpumOncPaReiPbc4Ph6ik3nNf8UTNg@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

Will, perhaps you can try it? I'm pretty sure the setup to reproduce
this is easy enough that I'll be able to reproduce in less than an hour
(export two tmpfs [sequential inode number fs] wthin the same 9p mount
in qemu without 'multidevs=remap'), but I don't even have that time
right now.

(I didn't even read the patch properly and it might not help at all,
sorry in this case)

> CCed Christian and Al, maybe they might be able to help directly or
> indirectly somehow. If not, we likely need to get Linus involved to
> decide if we want to at least temporarily revert the changes you mentioned.

I'm not sure this really needs to get Linus involved - it's breaking a
server that used to work even if qemu has been printing a warning about
these duplicate qid.path for a while, and the server really is the
better place to remap these inodes as we have no idea of the underlying
device id as far as I know...

So the question really just is do we have or can we build a workable, so
the question is can we resonable do any better, or do we just want to
live wth the old behaviour.
(Note that as far as I understand the old code isn't 100% "loop" proof
either anyway, a open(O_CREAT)/mkdir/mknod could happen to get identical
inode numbers as well, it's just less likely so folks haven't been
hitting it)


Thanks,
-- 
Dominique