Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2011 15:24:48 +0100
From: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
To: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, xfs@oss.sgi.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 08/12] superblock: introduce per-sb cache shrinker
 infrastructure
Message-ID: <20110604142448.GX11521@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
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On Sat, Jun 04, 2011 at 03:19:40PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> > The iprune_sem removal is fine as soon as you have a per-sb shrinker
> > for the inodes which keeps an active reference on the superblock until
> > all the inodes are evicted.
> 
> I really don't like that.  Stuff keeping active refs, worse yet doing that
> asynchronously...  Shrinkers should *not* do that.  Just grab a passive
> ref (i.e. bump s_count), try grab s_umount (shared) and if that thing still
> has ->s_root while we hold s_umount, go ahead.  Unregister either at the
> end of generic_shutdown_super() or from deactivate_locked_super(), between
> the calls of ->kill_sb() and put_filesystem().

PS: shrinkers should not acquire active refs; more specifically, they should
not _drop_ active refs, lest they end up dropping the last active one and
trigger unregistering a shrinker for superblock in question.  From inside of
->shrink(), with shrinker_rwsem held by caller.  Deadlock...
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