Re: [PATCH] vfs: Fix potential circular locking through setxattr() and removexattr()

[Jan Kara]

On Wed 31-07-24 19:27:43, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 08:16:57PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> > To fix this, either we'd have to keep the lower cache filesystem private to
> > cachefiles (but I don't think that works with the usecases) or we have to
> > somehow untangle this mmap_lock knot. This "page fault does quite some fs
> > locking under mmap_lock" problem is not causing filesystems headaches for
> > the first time. I would *love* to be able to always drop mmap_lock in the
> > page fault handler, fill the data into the page cache and then retry the
> > fault (so that filemap_map_pages() would then handle the fault without
> > filesystem involvement). It would make many things in filesystem locking
> > simpler. As far as I'm checking there are now not that many places that
> > could not handle dropping of mmap_lock during fault (traditionally the
> > problem is with get_user_pages() / pin_user_pages() users). So maybe this
> > dream would be feasible after all.
> 
> The traditional problem was the array of VMAs which was removed in
> commit b2cac248191b -- if we dropped the mmap_lock, any previous
> entries in that array would become invalid.  Now that array is gone,
> do we have any remaining dependencies on the VMAs remaining valid?

So as far as I've checked the callers of get_user_pages() /
pin_user_pages() I didn't find any that fundamentally could not handle
dropping of mmap_lock. So at least for callers I've seen it was mostly
about teaching them to handle dropped mmap_lock, reacquire it and possibly
reestablish some state which could get invalidated after the mmap_lock got
dropped.

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxxx>
SUSE Labs, CR