The race is that the shrink_dcache_memory shrinker could get called while a
filesystem is being unmounted, and could try to prune a dentry belonging to
that filesystem.
If it does, then it will call in to iput on the inode while the dentry is
no longer able to be found by the umounting process. If iput takes a
while, generic_shutdown_super could get all the way though
shrink_dcache_parent and shrink_dcache_anon and invalidate_inodes without
ever waiting on this particular inode.
Eventually the superblock gets freed anyway and if the iput tried to touch
it (which some filesystems certainly do), it will lose. The promised
"Self-destruct in 5 seconds" doesn't lead to a nice day.
The race is closed by holding s_umount while calling prune_one_dentry on
someone else's dentry. As a down_read_trylock is used,
shrink_dcache_memory will no longer try to prune the dentry of a filesystem
that is being unmounted, and unmount will not be able to start until any
such active prune_one_dentry completes.
This requires that prune_dcache *knows* which filesystem (if any) it is
doing the prune on behalf of so that it can be careful of other
filesystems. shrink_dcache_memory isn't called it on behalf of any
filesystem, and so is careful of everything.
shrink_dcache_anon is now passed a super_block rather than the s_anon list
out of the superblock, so it can get the s_anon list itself, and can pass
the superblock down to prune_dcache.
If prune_dcache finds a dentry that it cannot free, it leaves it where it
is (at the tail of the list) and exits, on the assumption that some other
thread will be removing that dentry soon. To try to make sure that some
work gets done, a limited number of dnetries which are untouchable are
skipped over while choosing the dentry to work on.
I believe this race was first found by Kirill Korotaev.
Cc: Jan Blunck <jblunck@suse.de>
Acked-by: Kirill Korotaev <dev@openvz.org>
Cc: Olaf Hering <olh@suse.de>
Acked-by: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com>
Acked-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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