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Date:   Tue, 22 Oct 2019 15:50:53 +0100
From:   Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
To:     Ritesh Harjani <riteshh@linux.ibm.com>
Cc:     linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        wugyuan@cn.ibm.com, jlayton@kernel.org, hsiangkao@aol.com,
        Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH RESEND 1/1] vfs: Really check for inode ptr in lookup_fast
Message-ID: <20191022145053.GY26530@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
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On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 03:37:36PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:

> I'm somewhat tempted to make __d_set_inode_and_type() do smp_store_release()
> for setting ->d_flags and __d_entry_type() - smp_load_acquire(); that would
> be pretty much free for x86 (as well as sparc, s390 and itanic) and reasonably
> cheap on ppc and arm64.  How badly would e.g. SMP arm suffer from the below
> (completely untested)?

PS: if we really go that way, we'd probably want __d_is_negative(), to be
used only under ->d_lock or with ->d_seq validation.

d_is_negative() callers in fs/dcache.c (all under ->d_lock) as well as
the RCU-side one in lookup_fast() (->d_seq validated) would you that.

Another fun place is do_unlinkat() - there we want to reorder
                inode = dentry->d_inode;
                if (d_is_negative(dentry))
                        goto slashes;
As it were, the same race here can lead to unbalanced iput(), if you
hit the window just right.