Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 15:11:54 +1100
From: David Gibson <dwg@au1.ibm.com>
To: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: William Lee Irwin <wli@holomorphy.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: RFC: Block reservation for hugetlbfs
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On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 02:09:09PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> David Gibson wrote:
> >On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 11:38:42AM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> >
> >>David Gibson wrote:
> >>
> >>>On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 03:18:59PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> >>
> >>>>This introduces
> >>>>tree_lock(r) -> hugetlb_lock
> >>>>
> >>>>And we already have
> >>>>hugetlb_lock -> lru_lock
> >>>>
> >>>>So we now have tree_lock(r) -> lru_lock, which would deadlock
> >>>>against lru_lock -> tree_lock(w), right?
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>>From a quick glance it looks safe, but I'd _really_ rather not
> >>>
> >>>>introduce something like this.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>Urg.. good point.  I hadn't even thought of that consequence - I was
> >>>more worried about whether I need i_lock or i_mutex to protect my
> >>>updates to i_blocks.
> >>>
> >>>Would hugetlb_lock -> tree_lock(r) be any preferable (I think that's a
> >>>possible alternative).
> >>>
> >>
> >>Yes I think that should avoid the introduction of new lock dependency.
> >
> >
> >Err... "Yes" appears to contradict the rest of you statement, since my
> >suggestion would still introduce a lock dependency, just a different
> >one one.  It is not at all obvious to me how to avoid a lock
> >dependency entirely.
> >
> 
> I mean a new core mm lock depenency (ie. lru_lock -> tree_lock).
> 
> But I must have been smoking something last night: for the life
> of me I can't see why I thought there was already a hugetlb_lock
> -> lru_lock dependency in there...?!
> 
> So I retract my statement. What you have there seems OK.

Sadly, you weren't smoking something, and it's not OK.  As akpm
pointed out later, the lru_lock dependecy is via __free_pages() which
is called from update_and_free_page() with hugetlb_lock held.

> >Also, any thoughts on whether I need i_lock or i_mutex or something
> >else would be handy..
> 
> I'm not much of an fs guy. How come you don't use i_size?

i_size is already used for a hard limit on the file size - faulting a
page beyond i_size will SIGBUS, whereas faulting a page beyond
i_blocks just isn't guaranteed.  In particular, we always extend
i_size when makiing a new mapping, whereas we only extend i_blocks
(and thus reserve pages) on a SHARED mapping (because space is being
guaranteed for things in the mapping, not for a random processes
MAP_PRIVATE copy).

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson
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