On Mon 02-05-11 12:07:59, Surbhi Palande wrote:

On 04/06/2011 02:21 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 08:18:56AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:

quoted

On Wed 06-04-11 15:40:05, Dave Chinner wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Apr 01, 2011 at 04:08:56PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:

quoted

On Fri 01-04-11 10:40:50, Dave Chinner wrote:

quoted

If you don't allow the page to be dirtied in the fist place, then
nothing needs to be done to the writeback path because there is
nothing dirty for it to write back.

  Sure but that's only the problem he was able to hit. But generally,
there's a problem with needing s_umount for unfreezing because it isn't
clear there aren't other code paths which can block with s_umount held
waiting for fs to get unfrozen. And these code paths would cause the same
deadlock. That's why I chose to get rid of s_umount during thawing.

Holding the s_umount lock while checking if frozen and sleeping
is essentially an ABBA lock inversion bug that can bite in many more
places that just thawing the filesystem.  Any where this is done should
be fixed, so I don't think just removing the s_umount lock from the thaw
path is sufficient to avoid problems.

  That's easily said but hard to do - any transaction start in ext3/4 may
block on filesystem being frozen (this seems to be similar for XFS as I'm
looking into the code) and transaction start traditionally nests inside
s_umount (and basically there's no way around that since sync() calls your
fs code with s_umount held).

Sure, but the question must be asked - why is ext3/4 even starting a
transaction on a clean filesystem during sync? A frozen filesystem,
by definition, is a clean filesytem, and therefore sync calls of any
kind should not be trying to write to the FS or start transactions.
XFS does this just fine, so I'd consider such behaviour on a frozen
filesystem a bug in ext3/4...

I had a look at the xfs code for seeing how this is done.
xfs_file_aio_write()
  xfs_wait_for_freeze()
    vfs_check_frozen()
So xfs_file_aio_write() writes to buffers when the FS is not frozen.

Now, I want to know what stops the following scenario from happening:
--------------------
xfs_file_aio_write()
  xfs_wait_for_freeze()
    vfs_check_frozen()
At this point F.S was not frozen, so the next instruction in the
xfs_file_aio_write() will be executed next.
However at this point (i.e after checking if F.S is frozen) the
write process gets pre-empted and say the _freeze_ process gets
control.

Now the F.S freezes and the write process gets the control back. And
so we end up writing to the page cache when the F.S is frozen.
--------------------

Can anyone please enlighten me on how & why this premption is _not_
possible?

  XFS works similarly as ext4 in this regard I believe. They have the log
frozen in xfs_freeze() so if the race you describe above happens, either
the writing process gets caught waiting for log to unfreeze or it manages
to start a transaction and then freezing process waits for transaction to
finish before it can proceed with freezing. I'm not sure why is there the
check in xfs_file_aio_write()...

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara [off-list ref]
SUSE Labs, CR