[PATCH RFC 0/4] change sb_writers to use percpu_rw_semaphore

[Oleg Nesterov]

Hello,

Al, Jan, could you comment? I mean the intent, the patches are
obviously not for inclusion yet.

We can remove everything from struct sb_writers except frozen
(which can become a boolean, it seems) and add the array of
percpu_rw_semaphore's instead.

__sb_start/end_write() can use percpu_down/up_read(), and
freeze/thaw_super() can use percpu_down/up_write().

Why:

	- Firstly, __sb_start_write() looks simply buggy. I does
	  __sb_end_write() if it sees ->frozen, but if it migrates
	  to another CPU before percpu_counter_dec() sb_wait_write()
	  can wrongly succeed if there is another task which holds
	  the same "semaphore": sb_wait_write() can miss the result
	  of the previous percpu_counter_inc() but see the result
	  of this percpu_counter_dec().

	- This code doesn't look simple. It would be better to rely
	  on the generic locking code.

	- __sb_start_write() will be a little bit faster, but this
	  is minor.

Todo:

	- __sb_start_write(wait => false) always fail.

	  Thivial, we already have percpu_down_read_trylock() just
	  this patch wasn't merged yet.

	- sb_lockdep_release() and sb_lockdep_acquire() play with
	  percpu_rw_semaphore's internals.

	  Trivial, we need a couple of new helper in percpu-rwsem.c.

	- Fix get_super_thawed(), it will spin if MS_RDONLY...

	  It is not clear to me what exactly should we do, but this
	  doesn't look hard. Perhaps it can just return if MS_RDONLY.

	- Most probably I missed something else, and I do not need
	  how to test.

Finally. freeze_super() calls synchronize_sched_expedited() 3 times in
a row. This is bad and just stupid. But if we change percpu_rw_semaphore
to use rcu_sync (see https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/7/11/211) we can avoid
this and do synchronize_sched() only once. Just we need some more simple
changes in percpu-rwsem.c, so that all sb_writers->rw_sem[] semaphores
could use the single sb_writers->rss.

In this case destroy_super() needs some modifications too,
percpu_free_rwsem() will be might_sleep(). But this looks simple too.

Oleg.

 fs/super.c         |  147 +++++++++++++++++++--------------------------------
 include/linux/fs.h |   14 +----
 2 files changed, 58 insertions(+), 103 deletions(-)

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