Re: [PATCH] vfs: Fix RCU path walk failiures due to uninitializednameidata seq number for root directory

From: Sedat Dilek
Date: Sat Apr 16 2011 - 01:44:20 EST


On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 11:54 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 4/15/2011 11:39 AM, Tim Chen wrote:
>>>
>>> During RCU walk in path_lookupat and path_openat, the rcu lookup
>>> frequently failed because when root directory was looked up, seq number
>>> was not properly set in nameidata. ÂWe dropped out of RCU walk in
>>> nameidata_drop_rcu due to mismatch in directory entry's seq number. ÂWe
>>> reverted to slow path walk that need to take references.
>>
>> Thanks Tim. Adding Andrew, Linus too. IMHO this fix is quite important to
>> actually make the fabled RCU dcache work -- without it it's just slower
>> because
>> it will fallback nearly allways.
>
> Well, only for absolute paths, but yes.
>
> I think all my benchmarking was for thing like "git diff", which are
> all about the relative paths and wouldn't have triggered this case.
>
> So this patch does look correct, and yes, should also be stable material for 38.
>
> And it's pretty fundamental. But I'd like to get a few more acks
> exactly because it's so fundamental. Al and Nick sadly are both gone.
> Anybody else feel like they know something about the path lookup code?
>
> Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Linus
>

I see this patch was pushed.

What's with fs-synchronize_rcu-when-unregister_filesystem-success-not-failure.patch
from [1]?

- Sedat -

[1] https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/707322/
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