linux-kernel - Re: deferring _

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Date:	Mon, 25 Jun 2012 15:19:56 +0200
From:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To:	Al Viro <viro@...IV.linux.org.uk>
Cc:	Mimi Zohar <zohar@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	". James Morris" <jmorris@...ei.org>,
	linux-security-module@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
Subject: Re: deferring __fput()

On Mon, 2012-06-25 at 13:14 +0100, Al Viro wrote:

> You mean, doing that from RCU callbacks?

Indirectly, yeah, but the RCU callback would schedule it or whatever.

>   Still a bad idea, IMO; you will end up with a context
> switch and unpleasantness with delayed user-visible effects of syscalls.  With aio we did have
> a delayed execution of fput() anyway; all that has changed there is that we use generic
> mechanism instead of home-grown analog thereof.

Right, the delayed effect is the main concern. The example in the
referred thread was unmount() returning -EBUSY after the last
close()/munmap().

> I'll need to reread that thread to comment on the specifics (had been too long ago; I don't
> remember the details), but...  See Linus' objections to full-async fput() circa this April
> or March.  There's a reason why this patchset uses task_work_add() whenever possible.

Ok, I'll try and find that thread, so the advantage of task_work_add()
is that you'll keep the work in the task that caused it wherever
possible, right -- provided its actually sitll around.

If we make fput() deferable in general we'll be sure to grow some 'fun'
cases. So are we going to add a sync against unmount someplace to avoid
these un-expected -EBUSY things?

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