[Ocfs2-devel] [PATCH] ocfs2: dlm: fix recursive locking deadlock

[Junxiao Bi]

Hi Mark,

On 12/19/2015 07:23 AM, Mark Fasheh wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 09:43:48AM +0800, Junxiao Bi wrote:
>> Hi Mark,
>>
>> On 12/15/2015 03:18 AM, Mark Fasheh wrote:
>>> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 02:03:17PM +0800, Junxiao Bi wrote:
>>>>> Second, this issue can be reproduced in old Linux kernels (e.g. 3.16.7-24)? there should not be any regression issue? 
>>>> Maybe just hard to reproduce, ocfs2 supports recursive locking.
>>>
>>> In what sense? The DLM might but the FS should never be making use of such a
>>> mechanism (it would be for userspace users).
>> See commit 743b5f1434f5 ("ocfs2: take inode lock in
>> ocfs2_iop_set/get_acl()"), it used recursive locking and caused a
>> deadlock, the call trace is in this patch's log.
> 
> Ahh ok so it's part of the buggy patch.
> 
> 
>>> We really can't add recursive locks without this getting rejected upstream.
>>> There's a whole slew of reasons why we don't like those in the kernel.
>> Is there any harm to support this lock in kernel?
> 
> Yeah so you can google search on why recursive locks are considered harmful
> by many programmers and in the Linux Kernel they are a big 'No No'. We used
> to have one recursive lock (the 'big kernel lock') which took a large effort
> to clean up.
> 
> Most objections are going to come down to the readability of the code and
> the nasty bugs that can come about as a result. Here's a random blog post I
> found explaining some of this:
> 
> http://blog.stephencleary.com/2013/04/recursive-re-entrant-locks.html
Good doc. Thank you for sharing it. Learned more about recursive locking.

But I am afraid, cluster lock suffers all drawbacks mentioned in that
doc since it is stick to node. P1 and P2 can hold one EX lock at the
same time, is it a kind of recursive locking for cluster lock?
Maybe it is just a bad naming of recursive locking. If two processes in
one node are allowed to hold one EX lock at the same time, why one
process not allowed to lock one EX lock two times?

Thanks,
Junxiao.

> 
> I'm pretty sure Linus has a rant about it somewhere too you can find.
> 
> 
> But basically your approach to fixing situations like this is going to be
> refactoring the code in a readable manner such that the lock is only taken
> once per code path.
> 
> Hope that all helps,
> 	--Mark
> 
> 
> --
> Mark Fasheh
>