Re: [PATCH v2] scsi: sr: get rid of sr global mutex

From: James Bottomley <jejb@linux.ibm.com>
To: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Merlijn Wajer <merlijn@archive.org>,
	merlijn@wizzup.org, linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org,
	Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>,
	"Martin K. Petersen" <martin.petersen@oracle.com>,
	Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] scsi: sr: get rid of sr global mutex
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2020 09:28:34 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1582046914.16681.11.camel@linux.ibm.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200218172347.GA3020@infradead.org>

On Tue, 2020-02-18 at 09:23 -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 09:20:28AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > Replace the global mutex with per-sr-device mutex.
> > > 
> > > Do we actually need the lock at all?  What is protected by it?
> > 
> > We do at least for cdrom_open.  It modifies the cdi structure with
> > no other protection and concurrent modification would at least
> > screw up the use counter which is not atomic.  Same reasoning for
> > cdrom_release.
> 
> Wouldn't the right fix to add locking to cdrom_open/release instead
> of having an undocumented requirement for the callers?

Yes ... but that's somewhat of a bigger patch because you now have to
reason about the callbacks within cdrom.  There's also the question of
whether you can assume ops->generic_packet() has its own concurrency
protections ... it's certainly true for SCSI, but is it for anything
else?  Although I suppose you can just not care and run the internal
lock over it anyway.

James