Re: [PATCH v3 24/25] sunrpc: Change how dentry's d_lock field is accessed

On Thu, 2013-07-04 at 05:20 +0100, Al Viro wrote:

On Wed, Jul 03, 2013 at 04:25:32PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:

quoted

There is no change in logic and everything should just work.

quoted

-		spin_lock(&file->f_path.dentry->d_lock);
+		d_lock(file->f_path.dentry);
 		if (!d_unhashed(file->f_path.dentry))
 			clnt = RPC_I(inode)->private;
 		if (clnt != NULL && atomic_inc_not_zero(&clnt->cl_count)) {
-			spin_unlock(&file->f_path.dentry->d_lock);
+			d_unlock(file->f_path.dentry);

Could somebody explain WTF is being protected here?  It's not ->private -
that gets set (and, more importantly, cleared) without ->d_lock in sight.
Trond, that seems to be your code from about three years ago (introduced
in "SUNRPC: Fix a race in rpc_info_open").  What's going on there?

AFAICR we're using the fact that the dentry will remain hashed until
we're in the process of freeing up the rpc_client. By testing that the
dentry is hashed under the dentry->d_lock, we are assured that the
non-NULL 'clnt' is still pointing to a valid rpc_client, and that it is
safe to access clnt->cl_count.

-- 
Trond Myklebust
Linux NFS client maintainer

NetApp
Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com
www.netapp.com