Re: [PATCH v2 30/54] fs: change evict_dentries_for_decrypted_inodes to use refcount

On Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 10:26:10PM +0000, Eric Biggers wrote:

On Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 02:25:21PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 11:39:30AM -0400, Josef Bacik wrote:

quoted

Instead of checking for I_WILL_FREE|I_FREEING simply use the refcount to
make sure we have a live inode.

Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>
---

I have no idea how the lifetime of such decrypted inodes are managed.
I suppose they don't carry a separate reference but are still somehow
safe to be accessed based on the mk_decrypted_inodes list. In any case
something must hold an i_obj_count if we want to use igrab() since I
don't see any relevant rcu protection here.

inodes are placed on mk_decrypted_inodes by the filesystem while it's
holding an i_count reference, and they're removed from the list by
->evict_inode shortly after i_count reaches zero.  So the corresponding
i_obj_count reference is just the one associated with i_count.

This patch looks correct: we do igrab() while holding
mk_decrypted_inodes_lock.  So either i_count is nonzero and we get a
temporary i_count reference, or it's zero and we skip the inode since it
cannot have dentries (and ->evict_inode is coming very soon as well).

Thanks for the explanation, Eric! That was exactly what I was looking for.