Re: [PATCH 3/6] EXT4: Remove ENOMEM/congestion_wait() loops.

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 10:13:04AM +1000, NeilBrown wrote:
> 
> Of particular interest is the ext4_journal_start family of calls which
> can now have EXT4_EX_NOFAIL 'or'ed in to the 'type'.  This could be seen
> as a blurring of types.  However 'type' is 8 bits, and EXT4_EX_NOFAIL is
> a high bit, so it is safe in practice.

I'm really not fond of this type blurring.  What I'd suggeset doing
instead is adding a "gfp_t gfp_mask" parameter to the
__ext4_journal_start_sb().  With the exception of one call site in
fs/ext4/ialloc.c, most of the callers of __ext4_journal_start_sb() are
via #define helper macros or inline funcions.  So it would just
require adding a GFP_NOFS as an extra parameter to the various macros
and inline functions which call __ext4_journal_start_sb() in
ext4_jbd2.h.

The function ext4_journal_start_with_revoke() is called exactly once
so we could just bury the __GFP_NOFAIL in the definition of that
macros, e.g.:

#define ext4_journal_start_with_revoke(inode, type, blocks, revoke_creds) \
	__ext4_journal_start((inode), __LINE__, (type), (blocks), 0,	\
			     GFP_NOFS | __GFP_NOFAIL, (revoke_creds))

but it's probably better to do something like this:

#define ext4_journal_start_with_revoke(gfp_mask, inode, type, blocks, revoke_creds) \
	__ext4_journal_start((inode), __LINE__, (type), (blocks), 0,	\
			     gfp_mask, (revoke_creds))

So it's explicit in the C function ext4_ext_remove_space() in
fs/ext4/extents.c that we are explicitly requesting the __GFP_NOFAIL
behavior.

Does that make sense?

					- Ted