From: Theodore Ts'o Subject: Re: 4.7.0-rc7 ext4 error in dx_probe Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2016 12:08:18 -0400 Message-ID: <20160808160818.GA9515@thunk.org> References: <20160718141723.GA8809@sig21.net> <7849bcd2-142d-0a12-0a04-7d0c3b6d788f@etorok.net> <20160805103544.kbt7znbzypvi5ofx@sig21.net> <20160805170228.GA19960@birch.djwong.org> <20160805181136.mcjnnvuo5m6kpxzb@sig21.net> <20160805191548.GD19960@birch.djwong.org> <20160808035634.GA16193@thunk.org> <20160808062810.GC8590@birch.djwong.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Johannes Stezenbach , =?iso-8859-1?B?VPZy9ms=?= Edwin , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: "Darrick J. Wong" Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20160808062810.GC8590@birch.djwong.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org On Sun, Aug 07, 2016 at 11:28:10PM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote: > > I have one lingering concern -- is it a bug that two processes could be > computing the checksum of a buffer simultaneously? I would have thought ext4 > would serialize that kind of buffer_head access... Do we know how this is happening? We've always depended on the VFS to provide this exclusion. The only way we should be modifying the buffer_head at the same time if two CPU's are trying to modify the directory at the same time, and that should _never_ be happening, even with the new directory parallism code, unless the file system has given permission and intends to do its own fine-grained locking. - Ted