• Jiaying Zhang's avatar
    ext4: remove i_mutex lock in ext4_evict_inode to fix lockdep complaining · 8c0bec21
    Jiaying Zhang authored
    The i_mutex lock and flush_completed_IO() added by commit 2581fdc8
    in ext4_evict_inode() causes lockdep complaining about potential
    deadlock in several places.  In most/all of these LOCKDEP complaints
    it looks like it's a false positive, since many of the potential
    circular locking cases can't take place by the time the
    ext4_evict_inode() is called; but since at the very least it may mask
    real problems, we need to address this.
    
    This change removes the flush_completed_IO() and i_mutex lock in
    ext4_evict_inode().  Instead, we take a different approach to resolve
    the software lockup that commit 2581fdc8 intends to fix.  Rather
    than having ext4-dio-unwritten thread wait for grabing the i_mutex
    lock of an inode, we use mutex_trylock() instead, and simply requeue
    the work item if we fail to grab the inode's i_mutex lock.
    
    This should speed up work queue processing in general and also
    prevents the following deadlock scenario: During page fault,
    shrink_icache_memory is called that in turn evicts another inode B.
    Inode B has some pending io_end work so it calls ext4_ioend_wait()
    that waits for inode B's i_ioend_count to become zero.  However, inode
    B's ioend work was queued behind some of inode A's ioend work on the
    same cpu's ext4-dio-unwritten workqueue.  As the ext4-dio-unwritten
    thread on that cpu is processing inode A's ioend work, it tries to
    grab inode A's i_mutex lock.  Since the i_mutex lock of inode A is
    still hold before the page fault happened, we enter a deadlock.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJiaying Zhang <jiayingz@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatar"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
    8c0bec21
ext4.h 79.4 KB