Re: [PATCH] nfsd: close potential race between delegation break and laundromat

[Jeff Layton <jeff.layton@primarydata.com>]

On Mon, 7 Jul 2014 15:31:08 -0400
"J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 03:14:50PM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > Sigh...after staring at this patch all day, I think I now see a
> > potential problem with the fault injection piece.
> > 
> > In the "recall" case, we may find a delegation on the cl_delegations
> > list that has already been recalled. If that's the case, then we
> > probably should just skip it.
> > 
> > I'll fix this patch, retest and resend. Sorry for the noise...
> 
> OK, so sounds like the fix isn't a big deal, but it also sounds like the
> fault injection code has come up as needing special attention a few
> times during this work now.
> 
> Has anyone actually ended up using that code?  Anna?
> 
> In retrospect I wonder if it's worth the trouble.  It's very
> special-purpose stuff and if nobody's using it then maybe we could just
> remove it....
> 
> --b.

I certainly wouldn't object. Having printks that are triggered by
reading from a debugfs file is just weird, and there are quite a few
races and bugs in this code.

I have patches that are basically a rewrite of it, but I left the UI
the same. It was necessary in order to allow for the changes to the
locking around this code, but that does mean that it's a larger chunk
of code than it used to be.

That said, we've shipped this code in several releases now so removing
it without any warning might not be a good idea. What may be best is to
mark it for deprecation if we don't want to keep it, and take my patches
that overhaul it in the interim. Then, remove it altogether in 2-3
releases.

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton@primarydata.com>