Re: [PATCH] VFS: use synchronize_rcu_expedited() in namespace_unlock()

[Florian Weimer]

On 10/26/2017 02:27 PM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> But just for completeness, one way to make this work across the board
> might be to instead use call_rcu(), with the callback function kicking
> off a workqueue handler to do the rest of the unmount.  Of course,
> in saying that, I am ignoring any mutexes that you might be holding
> across this whole thing, and also ignoring any problems that might arise
> when returning to userspace with some portion of the unmount operation
> still pending.  (For example, someone unmounting a filesystem and then
> immediately remounting that same filesystem.)

You really need to complete all side effects of deallocating a resource 
before returning to user space.  Otherwise, it will never be possible to 
allocate and deallocate resources in a tight loop because you either get 
spurious failures because too many unaccounted deallocations are stuck 
somewhere in the system (and the user can't tell that this is due to a 
race), or you get an OOM because the user manages to queue up too much 
state.

We already have this problem with RLIMIT_NPROC, where waitpid etc. 
return before the process is completely gone.  On some 
kernels/configurations, the resulting race is so wide that parallel make 
no longer works reliable because it runs into fork failures.

Thanks,
Florian