tree 5c04f9892c52faedfaa5b879a23f96bf77d02953
parent f8afead7169f0f28a4b421bcbdb510e52a2d094d
author Joel Becker <Joel.Becker@oracle.com> 1229552632 -0800
committer Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com> 1233613218 -0800

configfs: Silence lockdep on mkdir(), rmdir() and configfs_depend_item()

When attaching default groups (subdirs) of a new group (in mkdir() or
in configfs_register()), configfs recursively takes inode's mutexes
along the path from the parent of the new group to the default
subdirs. This is needed to ensure that the VFS will not race with
operations on these sub-dirs. This is safe for the following reasons:

- the VFS allows one to lock first an inode and second one of its
  children (The lock subclasses for this pattern are respectively
  I_MUTEX_PARENT and I_MUTEX_CHILD);
- from this rule any inode path can be recursively locked in
  descending order as long as it stays under a single mountpoint and
  does not follow symlinks.

Unfortunately lockdep does not know (yet?) how to handle such
recursion.

I've tried to use Peter Zijlstra's lock_set_subclass() helper to
upgrade i_mutexes from I_MUTEX_CHILD to I_MUTEX_PARENT when we know
that we might recursively lock some of their descendant, but this
usage does not seem to fit the purpose of lock_set_subclass() because
it leads to several i_mutex locked with subclass I_MUTEX_PARENT by
the same task.

>From inside configfs it is not possible to serialize those recursive
locking with a top-level one, because mkdir() and rmdir() are already
called with inodes locked by the VFS. So using some
mutex_lock_nest_lock() is not an option.

I am proposing two solutions:
1) one that wraps recursive mutex_lock()s with
   lockdep_off()/lockdep_on().
2) (as suggested earlier by Peter Zijlstra) one that puts the
   i_mutexes recursively locked in different classes based on their
   depth from the top-level config_group created. This
   induces an arbitrary limit (MAX_LOCK_DEPTH - 2 == 46) on the
   nesting of configfs default groups whenever lockdep is activated
   but this limit looks reasonably high. Unfortunately, this alos
   isolates VFS operations on configfs default groups from the others
   and thus lowers the chances to detect locking issues.

This patch implements solution 1).

Solution 2) looks better from lockdep's point of view, but fails with
configfs_depend_item(). This needs to rework the locking
scheme of configfs_depend_item() by removing the variable lock recursion
depth, and I think that it's doable thanks to the configfs_dirent_lock.
For now, let's stick to solution 1).

Signed-off-by: Louis Rilling <louis.rilling@kerlabs.com>
Acked-by: Joel Becker <joel.becker@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com>