Re: fs: NULL deref in atime_needs_update

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 5:09 AM, Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The more I look at the situation with d_is_...() wrt barriers and ->d_seq,
> the less I understand it; outside of RCU mode we don't really need the
> barriers for that stuff and in RCU mode ->d_flags handling had been
> a serious headache all along...

Yeah, one of my least favorite "recent" vfs improvements.

> I'm tempted to do as below .. [ changing it to be unde the seqlock ]
>
> David, Linus, do you see any problems with that?  To me it looks saner
> that way and as cheap as the current code, but I might be missing something
> here...

I'd absolutely love to see this. The memory ordering for the flags
updates and reading was always really confusing, and I hated how it
was hidden inside the random access functions. And apparently it
wasn't just confusing, it was buggy too.

But I'd love it _more_ if this also means that we can get rid of the
rmb's, which your patch didn't. Can we? Or does the ordering still
remain for some other issue?

            Linus