Re: [PATCH] ceph: fix deadlock bugs by making iput() calls asynchronous

[Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 12:51 AM Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:
> - wait for Josef to finish his inode refcount rework patchset that
>   gets rid of this whole "writeback doesn't hold an inode reference"
>   problem that is the root cause of this the deadlock.
>
> All that adding a whacky async iput work around does right now is
> make it harder for Josef to land the patchset that makes this
> problem go away entirely....
>

Per Max this is a problem present on older kernels as well, something
of this sort is needed to cover it regardless of what happens in
mainline.

As for mainline, I don't believe Josef's patchset addresses the problem.

The newly added refcount now taken by writeback et al only gates the
inode getting freed, it does not gate almost any of iput/evict
processing. As in with the patchset writeback does not hold a real
reference.

So ceph can still iput from writeback and find itself waiting in
inode_wait_for_writeback, unless the filesystem can be converted to
use the weaker refcounts and iobj_put instead (but that's not
something I would be betting on).