Re: About the try to remove cross-release feature entirely by Ingo

[Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>]

On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 10:40:41AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 10:16:24PM -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > The problems come from wrong classification. Waiters either classfied
> > > well or invalidated properly won't bitrot.
> > 
> > I disagree here.  As Ted says, it's the interactions between the
> > subsystems that leads to problems.  Everything's goig to work great
> > until somebody does something in a way that's never been tried before.
> 
> The question what is classified *well* mean?  At the extreme, we could
> put the locks for every single TCP connection into their own lockdep
> class.  But that would blow the limits in terms of the number of locks
> out of the water super-quickly --- and it would destroy the ability
> for lockdep to learn what the proper locking order should be.  Yet
> given Lockdep's current implementation, the only way to guarantee that
> there won't be any interactions between subsystems that cause false
> positives would be to categorizes locks for each TCP connection into
> their own class.

I'm not sure I agree with this part.  What if we add a new TCP lock class
for connections which are used for filesystems/network block devices/...?
Yes, it'll be up to each user to set the lockdep classification correctly,
but that's a relatively small number of places to add annotations,
and I don't see why it wouldn't work.