From: "Lever, Charles" <Charles.Lever@netapp.com>
Subject: RE: [PATCH] NFS: fix client hang due to race condition
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 19:11:25 -0700
Message-ID: <482A3FA0050D21419C269D13989C611308539D6E@lavender-fe.eng.netapp.com>
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Cc: <akpm@osdl.org>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	<nfs@lists.sourceforge.net>
To: "Nick Wilson" <njw@osdl.org>, <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Sender: nfs-admin@lists.sourceforge.net
Errors-To: nfs-admin@lists.sourceforge.net

> The flags field in struct nfs_inode is protected by the BKL.  The
> following two code paths (there may be more, but my test program only
> hits these two) modify the flags without obtaining the lock:
>=20
>     nfs_end_data_update
>     nfs_release
>     nfs_file_release
>     __fput
>     fput
>     filp_close
>     sys_close
>     syscall_call
>=20
>     nfs_revalidate_mapping
>     nfs_file_write
>     do_sync_write
>     vfs_write
>     sys_write
>     syscall_call
>=20
> Running multiple instances of a simple program [1] that opens, writes
> to, and closes NFS mounted files eventually results in the programs
> hanging on an SMP system (see kernel .config [3]).
>=20
> I've been testing this with 100 instances of the program:
>     $ ./breaknfs 100 &
>=20
> Usually within 10 minutes, all instances of breaknfs will hang.  They
> disappear from the output of 'top' and there is no NFS=20
> activity between
> the client and server.

[ sysrq output snipped... ]

> I've reproduced this bug on 2.6.11.10, 2.6.12-mm2, and 2.6.13-rc2.
>=20
> With my patch against 2.6.13-rc2 below, I ran 100 instances=20
> of breaknfs
> with this patch for 14 hours and I was unable to get the=20
> client to hang.

i agree this is a problem.

but instead of using heavyweight synchronization, why not convert the
NFS_INO flags into atomic bitops?  i have a patch that does that; would
need to be ported to the latest kernels and tested to see if it
addresses the problem.

nick, are you interested in trying it out?


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