linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] VFS: use synchronize_rcu_expedited() in namespace

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Date:   Mon, 27 Nov 2017 12:27:04 +0100
From:   Florian Weimer <fweimer@...hat.com>
To:     paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com, NeilBrown <neilb@...e.com>
Cc:     Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Josh Triplett <josh@...htriplett.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] VFS: use synchronize_rcu_expedited() in
 namespace_unlock()

On 10/26/2017 02:27 PM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> But just for completeness, one way to make this work across the board
> might be to instead use call_rcu(), with the callback function kicking
> off a workqueue handler to do the rest of the unmount.  Of course,
> in saying that, I am ignoring any mutexes that you might be holding
> across this whole thing, and also ignoring any problems that might arise
> when returning to userspace with some portion of the unmount operation
> still pending.  (For example, someone unmounting a filesystem and then
> immediately remounting that same filesystem.)

You really need to complete all side effects of deallocating a resource 
before returning to user space.  Otherwise, it will never be possible to 
allocate and deallocate resources in a tight loop because you either get 
spurious failures because too many unaccounted deallocations are stuck 
somewhere in the system (and the user can't tell that this is due to a 
race), or you get an OOM because the user manages to queue up too much 
state.

We already have this problem with RLIMIT_NPROC, where waitpid etc. 
return before the process is completely gone.  On some 
kernels/configurations, the resulting race is so wide that parallel make 
no longer works reliable because it runs into fork failures.

Thanks,
Florian