Re: [PATCH net-next] net-sysfs: try not to restart the syscall if it will fail eventually

On Thu, 2021-10-07 at 16:00 +0200, Antoine Tenart wrote:

Due to deadlocks in the networking subsystem spotted 12 years ago[1],
a workaround was put in place[2] to avoid taking the rtnl lock when it
was not available and restarting the syscall (back to VFS, letting
userspace spin). The following construction is found a lot in the net
sysfs and sysctl code:

  if (!rtnl_trylock())
          return restart_syscall();

This can be problematic when multiple userspace threads use such
interfaces in a short period, making them to spin a lot. This happens
for example when adding and moving virtual interfaces: userspace
programs listening on events, such as systemd-udevd and NetworkManager,
do trigger actions reading files in sysfs. It gets worse when a lot of
virtual interfaces are created concurrently, say when creating
containers at boot time.

Returning early without hitting the above pattern when the syscall will
fail eventually does make things better. While it is not a fix for the
issue, it does ease things.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/49A4D5D5.5090602@trash.net/ (local)
    https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/m14oyhis31.fsf@fess.ebiederm.org/ (local)
    and https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20090226084924.16cb3e08@nehalam/ (local)
[2] Rightfully, those deadlocks are *hard* to solve.

Signed-off-by: Antoine Tenart <atenart@kernel.org>

AFAICS, the current behaviour is preserved and the change is safe. I
think that preserving the current error-code for duplex_show and
speed_show is the correct thing to do.
Reviewed-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>