On Wed, Apr 08, 2015 at 08:19:27AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> That's kinda nasty, and it has no documentation explaining when or
> why we'd need to drop the i_mutex. How are we supposed to know if we
> need to drop the i_mutex or not?
We need to drop it if we hold it, pretty easy.
> What happens if the upper VFS
> layers change or we have a multiple call paths that have different
> i_mutex contexts (i.e. one holds, another doesn't)?
We avoid this in the VFS, as everytime we had it filesystems were getting it
wrong.
However you have a point in that we should probably have asserts that the
right locks are held.
> Which makes me wonder - is this layout breaking stuff at the right
> layer?
We can't do it in the VFS as it needs to be atomic vs the lock that
protects write in ->write and ->fallocate, which is only taken in
the filesystem. For ->setattr in theory we could do it in the VFS,
but if the other callers can't do it in the VFS that will just lead
to code duplication.
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