linux-imx

dm snapshot: rework COW throttling to fix deadlock

Commit 721b1d98fb517a ("dm snapshot: Fix excessive memory usage and
workqueue stalls") introduced a semaphore to limit the maximum number of
in-flight kcopyd (COW) jobs.

The implementation of this throttling mechanism is prone to a deadlock:

1. One or more threads write to the origin device causing COW, which is
   performed by kcopyd.

2. At some point some of these threads might reach the s->cow_count
   semaphore limit and block in down(&s->cow_count), holding a read lock
   on _origins_lock.

3. Someone tries to acquire a write lock on _origins_lock, e.g.,
   snapshot_ctr(), which blocks because the threads at step (2) already
   hold a read lock on it.

4. A COW operation completes and kcopyd runs dm-snapshot's completion
   callback, which ends up calling pending_complete().
   pending_complete() tries to resubmit any deferred origin bios. This
   requires acquiring a read lock on _origins_lock, which blocks.

   This happens because the read-write semaphore implementation gives
   priority to writers, meaning that as soon as a writer tries to enter
   the critical section, no readers will be allowed in, until all
   writers have completed their work.

   So, pending_complete() waits for the writer at step (3) to acquire
   and release the lock. This writer waits for the readers at step (2)
   to release the read lock and those readers wait for
   pending_complete() (the kcopyd thread) to signal the s->cow_count
   semaphore: DEADLOCK.

The above was thoroughly analyzed and documented by Nikos Tsironis as
part of his initial proposal for fixing this deadlock, see:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/dm-devel/2019-October/msg00001.html

Fix this deadlock by reworking COW throttling so that it waits without
holding any locks. Add a variable 'in_progress' that counts how many
kcopyd jobs are running. A function wait_for_in_progress() will sleep if
'in_progress' is over the limit. It drops _origins_lock in order to
avoid the deadlock.

Reported-by: Guruswamy Basavaiah <guru2018@gmail.com>
Reported-by: Nikos Tsironis <ntsironis@arrikto.com>
Reviewed-by: Nikos Tsironis <ntsironis@arrikto.com>
Tested-by: Nikos Tsironis <ntsironis@arrikto.com>
Fixes: 721b1d98fb51 ("dm snapshot: Fix excessive memory usage and workqueue stalls")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v5.0+
Depends-on: 4a3f111a73a8c ("dm snapshot: introduce account_start_copy() and account_end_copy()")
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>