Re: Getting rid of freezer for suspend [was Re: [fuse-devel] [PATCH] fuse: make fuse daemon frozen along with kernel threads]

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 06:34:16 PM Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Miklos Szeredi <miklos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 2:13 PM, Miklos Szeredi <miklos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Pavel Machek <pavel@xxxxxx> wrote:
> >>
> >>> (After all, with FUSE, filesystem clients are just doing IPC. In ideal
> >>> world, that would be freezeable and killable with -9).
> 
> Well, I thought this can be constrained to locks directly related to
> the fuse filesystem itself, but it can't...  The reason is page
> faults.  Pretty much everyone and their brother uses get_user_pages*,
> holding various locks (mmap_sem for sure but others as well).  A fuse
> filesystem frozen during a page read will block those.
> 
> Separating those parts of the kernel that can be frozen from those
> that can't looks increasingly difficult.
> 
> So I think the PF_FREEZE_DAEMON idea (the patch from Li Fei that
> started this thread) may still be our best bet at handling this
> situation.  The idea being that pure "originator" processes (ones that
> take no part in serving filesystem syscalls) can be frozen up-front.
> Then the "fuse daemon" (or "server") processes are hopefully in a
> quiescent state and can be frozen without difficulty.
> 
> Unfortunately it needs help from userspace: the kernel can't easily
> guess which processes are part of a "fuse daemon" and which aren't.
> Fortunately we have a standard library (libfuse) that can tell it to
> the kernel for the vast majority of cases.

So basically the idea would be to introduce something like PF_FREEZE_LATE
for user space processes that need to be frozen after all of the other
(non-PF_FREEZE_LATE) user space processes have been frozen and hack fuse
to use that flag?

Rafael


-- 
I speak only for myself.
Rafael J. Wysocki, Intel Open Source Technology Center.
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