The cause of livelocks there is that we are taking ->d_lock on
dentry and its parent in the wrong order, forcing us to use
trylock on the parent's one. d_walk() takes them in the right
order, and unfortunately it's not hard to create a situation
when shrink_dentry_list() can't make progress since trylock
keeps failing, and shrink_dcache_parent() or check_submounts_and_drop()
keeps calling d_walk() disrupting the very shrink_dentry_list() it's
waiting for.
Solution is straightforward - if that trylock fails, let's unlock
the dentry itself and take locks in the right order. We need to
stabilize ->d_parent without holding ->d_lock, but that's doable
using RCU. And we'd better do that in the very beginning of the
loop in shrink_dentry_list(), since the checks on refcount, etc.
would need to be redone anyway.
That deals with a half of the problem - killing dentries on the
shrink list itself. Another one (dropping their parents) is
in the next commit.
locking parent is interesting - it would be easy to do rcu_read_lock(),
lock whatever we think is a parent, lock dentry itself and check
if the parent is still the right one. Except that we need to check
that *before* locking the dentry, or we are risking taking ->d_lock
out of order. Fortunately, once the D1 is locked, we can check if
D2->d_parent is equal to D1 without the need to lock D2; D2->d_parent
can start or stop pointing to D1 only under D1->d_lock, so taking
D1->d_lock is enough. In other words, the right solution is
rcu_read_lock/lock what looks like parent right now/check if it's
still our parent/rcu_read_unlock/lock the child.
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
046b961b45