fs: Improve filesystem freezing handling
vfs_check_frozen() tests are racy since the filesystem can be frozen just after
the test is performed. Thus in write paths we can end up marking some pages or
inodes dirty even though the file system is already frozen. This creates
problems with flusher thread hanging on frozen filesystem.
Another problem is that exclusion between ->page_mkwrite() and filesystem
freezing has been handled by setting page dirty and then verifying s_frozen.
This guaranteed that either the freezing code sees the faulted page, writes it,
and writeprotects it again or we see s_frozen set and bail out of page fault.
This works to protect from page being marked writeable while filesystem
freezing is running but has an unpleasant artefact of leaving dirty (although
unmodified and writeprotected) pages on frozen filesystem resulting in similar
problems with flusher thread as the first problem.
This patch aims at providing exclusion between write paths and filesystem
freezing. We implement a writer-freeze read-write semaphore in the superblock.
Actually, there are three such semaphores because of lock ranking reasons - one
for page fault handlers (->page_mkwrite), one for all other writers, and one of
internal filesystem purposes (used e.g. to track running transactions). Write
paths which should block freezing (e.g. directory operations, ->aio_write(),
->page_mkwrite) hold reader side of the semaphore. Code freezing the filesystem
takes the writer side.
Only that we don't really want to bounce cachelines of the semaphores between
CPUs for each write happening. So we implement the reader side of the semaphore
as a per-cpu counter and the writer side is implemented using s_writers.frozen
superblock field.
[AV: microoptimize sb_start_write(); we want it fast in normal case]
BugLink: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/897421
Tested-by: Kamal Mostafa <kamal@canonical.com>
Tested-by: Peter M. Petrakis <peter.petrakis@canonical.com>
Tested-by: Dann Frazier <dann.frazier@canonical.com>
Tested-by: Massimo Morana <massimo.morana@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2 files changed