Re: possible circular locking dependency detected

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 2:43 PM, Linus Torvalds
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Al Viro [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Outside as in "all fs activity in bind happens under it".  Along with
assignment to ->u.addr, etc.  IOW, make it the outermost lock there.

Hah, yes. I misunderstood you.

Yes. In fact that fixes the problem I mentioned, rather than introducing it.

So the easiest approach would seem to be to revert commit c845acb324aa
("af_unix: Fix splice-bind deadlock"), and then apply the lock split.

Like the attached two patches.

This is still *entirely* untested.

As far as I can tell, this should work as I can't currently imagine why
a fs operation might end up binding a unix socket despite the idea to
make af_unix.c yet more complicated in order to work around irregular
behaviour of (as far as I can tell) a single filesystem (for which
kern_path_create doesn't really mean kern_path_create and it has to work
around that once it gets control) goes against all instincts I have in
this area. If filesystems need to do arbitrary stuff when
__sb_start_write is called for 'their' superblock, they should be able
to do so directly.

At present, this is a theoretic concern as I can't (due to other work
committments) put any non-cursory work into this before Sunday. There
may also be other reasons why this idea is impractical or even
unworkable.