A while ago a patch to resolve a deadlock during directory creation was
merged. This delayed the hashing of lookup dentrys until the ->mkdir()
(or ->symlink()) operation completed to ensure we always went through
->lookup() instead of also having processes go through ->revalidate() so
our VFS locking remained consistent.
Now we are seeing a couple of side affects of that change in situations
with heavy mount activity.
Two cases have been identified:
1) When a mount request is triggered, due to the delayed hashing, the
directory created by user space for the mount point doesn't have the
DCACHE_AUTOFS_PENDING flag set. In the case of an autofs multi-mount
where a tree of mount point directories are created this can lead to
the path walk continuing rather than the dentry being sent to the wait
queue to wait for request completion. This is because, if the pending
flag isn't set, the criteria for deciding this is a mount in progress
fails to hold, namely that the dentry is not a mount point and has no
subdirectories.
2) A mount request dentry is initially created negative and unhashed.
It remains this way until the ->mkdir() callback completes. Since it
is unhashed a fresh dentry is used when the user space mount request
creates the mount point directory. This leaves the original dentry
negative and unhashed. But revalidate has no way to tell the VFS that
the dentry has changed, other than to force another ->lookup() by
returning false, which is at best wastefull and at worst not possible.
This results in an -ENOENT return from the original path walk when in
fact the mount succeeded.
To resolve this we need to ensure that the same dentry is used in all
calls to ->lookup() during the course of a mount request. This patch
achieves that by adding the initial dentry to a look aside list and
removes it at ->mkdir() or ->symlink() completion (or when the dentry is
released), since these are the only create operations autofs4 supports.
Signed-off-by: Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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