On Monday January 14, viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk wrote:
quoted text
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 02:21:45PM +1100, Neil Brown wrote:
> 
> > Maybe it isn't there any more....
> > 
> > Once upon a time, when I 
> >    echo remove > /sys/block/mdX/md/dev-YYY/state
> 
> Egads.  And just what will protect you from parallel callers
> of state_store()?  buffer->mutex does *not* do that - it only
> gives you exclusion on given struct file.  Run the command
> above from several shells and you've got independent open
> from each redirect => different struct file *and* different
> buffer for each => no exclusion whatsoever.

well in -mm, rdev_attr_store gets a lock on
rdev->mddev->reconfig_mutex. 
It doesn't test is rdev->mddev is NULL though, so if the write happens
after unbind_rdev_from_array, we lose.
A test for NULL would be easy enough.  And I think that the mddev
won't actually disappear until the rdevs are all gone (you subsequent
comment about kobject_del ordering seems to confirm that) so a simple test
for NULL should be sufficient.

quoted text
> 
> And _that_ is present right in the mainline tree - it's unrelated
> to -mm kobject changes.
> 
> BTW, yes, you do have a deadlock there - kobject_del() will try to evict
> children, which will include waiting for currently running ->store()
> to finish, which will include the caller since .../state *is* a child of
> that sucker.
> 
> The real problem is the lack of any kind of exclusion considerations in
> md.c itself, AFAICS.  Fun with ordering is secondary (BTW, yes, it is
> a problem - will sysfs ->store() to attribute between export_rdev() and
> kobject_del() work correctly?)

Probably not.  The possibility that rdev->mddev could be NULL would
break a lot of these.  Maybe I should delay setting rdev->mddev to
NULL until after the kobject_del.  Then audit them all.

Thanks.  I'll see what I can some up with.

NeilBrown
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