Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com> writes:The vfs still does. So at least for directory tree manipulation we need to hold i_mutex before we grab sysfs_mutex. I think that means we need to unscramble the whole set of locking order issues. In lookup we have: local_vfs_lock -> fs_global_lock In modifications we have: fs_global_lock -> local_vfs_lock Which is the definition of a lock ordering problem. Currently we play jump through some significant hoops to keep things in local_vfs_lock -> fs_global_lock order. If we also take the rename_mutex on directory adds and deletes we may be able to keep jumping through those hoops. However I expect we would be in a much better situation if we could figure out how to avoid the problem. It looks like the easy way to handle this is to make the sysfs_dirent list rcu protected. Which means we can fix our lock ordering problem without VFS modifications. Allowing the locking to always be: sysfs_mutex ... i_mutex. After that it would be safe and a good idea to have unshared inodes between superblocks, just so we don't surprise anyone making generic VFS assumptions. Eric --
