Let me put it this way:

Under file creation from different threads, ext4 will generate a series of
dquot updates (incore and then ondisk, through journal):

dquot update1
dquot update2
dquot update3
...
dquot updateN

Either with my patch or without it, ondisk dquot update through journal
may miss dquot update1, dquot update2, ... dquot update{N-1}.

You can easily see that from the code of dquot_commit():

int dquot_commit(struct dquot *dquot)
{
        int ret = 0;
        struct quota_info *dqopt = sb_dqopt(dquot->dq_sb);

        mutex_lock(&dqopt->dqio_mutex);
        spin_lock(&dq_list_lock);
        if (!clear_dquot_dirty(dquot)) {
                spin_unlock(&dq_list_lock);
                goto out_sem;
        }
...
}


If actual dquot_commit() wrote dquot update N, the threads commiting
updates 1 through N-1 will exit immediately once they get dqio_mutex
since the dquot will NOT be dirty.

My patch only avoids blocking on dqio_mutex when we know for sure
that another will NECESSARILY write the needed or a FRESHER dquot ondisk.

quoted

This change mean if this dquot is dirty we skip, this
won't work because in this way, quota update is only kept in vfs dquota
memory and newer update is not wrote to journal file and not wrapped into
transaction too.

That's not true.

As I explained earlier, having DQ_MOD_B set at this point means another
thread is going to write dquot but hasn't yet started doing so. This thread
does not care whether it updates the ondisk dquot with its own data or with
fresher data which came from another thread. In-core dquot has no indication
of whose data in contains.

As I also explained earlier, the update cannot happen in the context of
another transaction because thread A which sees DQ_MOD_B set and thread
B which is running dquot_commit() both have journal handles to the same
transaction. There's only one running transaction at a time and thread B
does not switch to another transaction.

Please read the code carefully.

quoted

This is not what journal quota means to do.


Thanks,
Shilong

quoted

Thank you,
Andrew