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authorVladimir Davydov <vdavydov@parallels.com>2014-04-03 14:48:21 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2014-04-03 16:21:04 -0700
commitbcccff93af359533683603255124fc19eb12613d (patch)
treeccba7107fcb9b08fb038af3b90d0ee213cbe3757 /mm
parent5509a5d27b971a90b940e148ca9ca53312e4fa7a (diff)
downloadlinux-bcccff93af359533683603255124fc19eb12613d.tar.bz2
kobject: don't block for each kobject_uevent
Currently kobject_uevent has somewhat unpredictable semantics. The point is, since it may call a usermode helper and wait for it to execute (UMH_WAIT_EXEC), it is impossible to say for sure what lock dependencies it will introduce for the caller - strictly speaking it depends on what fs the binary is located on and the set of locks fork may take. There are quite a few kobject_uevent's users that do not take this into account and call it with various mutexes taken, e.g. rtnl_mutex, net_mutex, which might potentially lead to a deadlock. Since there is actually no reason to wait for the usermode helper to execute there, let's make kobject_uevent start the helper asynchronously with the aid of the UMH_NO_WAIT flag. Personally, I'm interested in this, because I really want kobject_uevent to be called under the slab_mutex in the slub implementation as it used to be some time ago, because it greatly simplifies synchronization and automatically fixes a kmemcg-related race. However, there was a deadlock detected on an attempt to call kobject_uevent under the slab_mutex (see https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/14/45), which was reported to be fixed by releasing the slab_mutex for kobject_uevent. Unfortunately, there was no information about who exactly blocked on the slab_mutex causing the usermode helper to stall, neither have I managed to find this out or reproduce the issue. BTW, this is not the first attempt to make kobject_uevent use UMH_NO_WAIT. Previous one was made by commit f520360d93cd ("kobject: don't block for each kobject_uevent"), but it was wrong (it passed arguments allocated on stack to async thread) so it was reverted in 05f54c13cd0c ("Revert "kobject: don't block for each kobject_uevent"."). It targeted on speeding up the boot process though. Signed-off-by: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov@parallels.com> Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions