Re: [RFC PATCH v3 1/8] Use refcount_t for ucounts reference counting
From: Alexey Gladkov <hidden>
Date: 2021-01-21 12:08:18
Also in:
io-uring, lkml
On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 07:57:36PM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Alexey Gladkov [off-list ref] writes:quoted
On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 12:34:29PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:quoted
On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 11:46 AM Alexey Gladkov [off-list ref] wrote:quoted
Sorry about that. I thought that this code is not needed when switching from int to refcount_t. I was wrong.Well, you _may_ be right. I personally didn't check how the return value is used. I only reacted to "it certainly _may_ be used, and there is absolutely no comment anywhere about why it wouldn't matter".I have not found examples where checked the overflow after calling refcount_inc/refcount_add. For example in kernel/fork.c:2298 : current->signal->nr_threads++; atomic_inc(¤t->signal->live); refcount_inc(¤t->signal->sigcnt); $ semind search signal_struct.sigcnt def include/linux/sched/signal.h:83 refcount_t sigcnt; m-- kernel/fork.c:723 put_signal_struct if (refcount_dec_and_test(&sig->sigcnt)) m-- kernel/fork.c:1571 copy_signal refcount_set(&sig->sigcnt, 1); m-- kernel/fork.c:2298 copy_process refcount_inc(¤t->signal->sigcnt); It seems to me that the only way is to use __refcount_inc and then compare the old value with REFCOUNT_MAX Since I have not seen examples of such checks, I thought that this is acceptable. Sorry once again. I have not tried to hide these changes.The current ucount code does check for overflow and fails the increment in every case. So arguably it will be a regression and inferior error handling behavior if the code switches to the ``better'' refcount_t data structure. I originally didn't use refcount_t because silently saturating and not bothering to handle the error makes me uncomfortable. Not having to acquire the ucounts_lock every time seems nice. Perhaps the path forward would be to start with stupid/correct code that always takes the ucounts_lock for every increment of ucounts->count, that is later replaced with something more optimal. Not impacting performance in the non-namespace cases and having good performance in the other cases is a fundamental requirement of merging code like this.
Did I understand your suggestion correctly that you suggest to use spin_lock for atomic_read and atomic_inc ? If so, then we are already incrementing the counter under ucounts_lock. ... if (atomic_read(&ucounts->count) == INT_MAX) ucounts = NULL; else atomic_inc(&ucounts->count); spin_unlock_irq(&ucounts_lock); return ucounts; something like this ? -- Rgrds, legion