Re: Warning in net/ipv4/af_inet.c:154

[David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>]

From: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 13:56:17 +1000

> I'm somewhat confused by the two stage locking in the socket lock
> (ie sk_lock.slock and sk_lock.owned).
> 
> What state should the socket lock be in for serialising updates of
> sk_forward_alloc? In some cases we appear to update it with sk_lock.slock =
> unlocked, sk_lock.owned = 1:

If sh_lock.owned=1 the user has grabbed exclusive sleepable lock on the
socket, it does this via something approximating:

retry:
	spin_lock(&sk_lock.slock);
	was_locked = sk_lock.owned;
	if (!was_locked)
		sk_lock.owned = 1;
	spin_unlock(&sk_lock.slock);
	if (was_locked) {
		sleep_on(condition(sk_lock.owned));
		goto retry;
	}

This allows user context code to sleep with exclusive access to the
socket.

Code that cannot sleep takes the spinlock, and queues the work if the
owner field if non-zero.  Else, it keeps the spinlock held and does
the work.

In either case, socket modifications are thus done completely protected
from other contexts.