linux-ext4 - Re: [URGENT PATCH] ext4: fix potential deadlock in ext4_evict

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Date:	Fri, 26 Aug 2011 19:24:26 +1000
From:	Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
To:	Tao Ma <tm@....ma>
Cc:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>, Jiaying Zhang <jiayingz@...gle.com>,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [URGENT PATCH] ext4: fix potential deadlock in ext4_evict_inode()

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 05:03:14PM +0800, Tao Ma wrote:
> On 08/26/2011 04:44 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 05:35:07PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> >> On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 11:33:44PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Note: this will probably need to be sent to Linus as an emergency
> >>> bugfix ASAP, since it was introduced in 3.1-rc1, so it represents a
> >>> regression.
> >>
> >> It doesn't appear to be a bug. All of the new ext4 lockdep reports
> >> in 3.1 I've seen (except for the mmap_sem/i_mutex one) are false
> >> positives....
> > 
> > While the lockdep report is false positive, I agree that your
> > change is the right fix to make - the IO completions are already
> > queued on the workqueue, so they don't need to be flushed to get
> > them to complete. All that needs to be done is call
> > ext4_ioend_wait() for them to complete, and that gets rid of the
> > i_mutex altogether. (*)
> ext4_ioend_wait can't work here for a nasty bug. Please see the commit
> log of 2581fdc8.

Unless I'm missing something, the described race with
ext4_truncate() flushing completions without the i_mutex lock held
cannot occur if you've already waited for all pending completions to
drain by calling ext4_ioend_wait()....

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@...morbit.com
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