Commits
Linus Torvalds committed 0d98439ea3c
vfs: use lockred "dead" flag to mark unrecoverably dead dentries This simplifies the RCU to refcounting code in particular. I was originally intending to leave this for later, but walking through all the dput() logic (see previous commit), I realized that the dput() "might_sleep()" check was misleadingly weak. And I removed it as misleading, both for performance profiling and for debugging. However, the might_sleep() debugging case is actually true: the final dput() can indeed sleep, if the inode of the dentry that you are releasing ends up sleeping at iput time (see dentry_iput()). So the problem with the might_sleep() in dput() wasn't that it wasn't true, it was that it wasn't actually testing and triggering on the interesting case. In particular, just about *any* dput() can indeed sleep, if you happen to race with another thread deleting the file in question, and you then lose the race to the be the last dput() for that file. But because it's a very rare race, the debugging code would never trigger it in practice. Why is this problematic? The new d_rcu_to_refcount() (see commit 15570086b590: "vfs: reimplement d_rcu_to_refcount() using lockref_get_or_lock()") does a dput() for the failure case, and it does it under the RCU lock. So potentially sleeping really is a bug. But there's no way I'm going to fix this with the previous complicated "lockref_get_or_lock()" interface. And rather than revert to the old and crufty nested dentry locking code (which did get this right by delaying the reference count updates until they were verified to be safe), let's make forward progress. Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>