Hallelujah, after a couple of weeks and several rewrites, here comes the third iteration of my patches to improve filesystem freezing. Filesystem freezing is currently racy and thus we can end up with dirty data on frozen filesystem (see changelog patch 06 for detailed race description). This patch series aims at fixing this. To be able to block all places where inodes get dirtied, I've moved filesystem freeze handling in mnt_want_write() / mnt_drop_write(). This however required some code shuffling and changes to kern_path_create() (see patches 02-05). I think the result is OK but opinions may differ ;). The advantage of this change also is that all filesystems get freeze protection almost for free - even ext2 can handle freezing well now. Another potential contention point might be patch 19. In that patch we make freeze_super() refuse to freeze the filesystem when there are open but unlinked files which may be impractical in some cases. The main reason for this is the problem with handling of file deletion from fput() called with mmap_sem held (e.g. from munmap(2)), and then there's the fact that we cannot really force such filesystem into a consistent state... But if people think that freezing with open but unlinked files should happen, then I have some possible solutions in mind (maybe as a separate patchset since this is large enough). I'm not able to hit any deadlocks, lockdep warnings, or dirty data on frozen filesystem despite beating it with fsstress and bash-shared-mapping while freezing and unfreezing for several hours (using ext4 and xfs) so I'm reasonably confident this could finally be the right solution. And for people wanting to test - this patchset is based on patch series "Push file_update_time() into .page_mkwrite" so you'll need to pull that one in as well. Changes since v2: * completely rewritten * freezing is now blocked at VFS entry points * two stage freezing to handle both mmapped writes and other IO The biggest changes since v1: * have two counters to provide safe state transitions for SB_FREEZE_WRITE and SB_FREEZE_TRANS states * use percpu counters instead of own percpu structure * added documentation fixes from the old fs freezing series * converted XFS to use SB_FREEZE_TRANS counter instead of its private m_active_trans counter Honza CC: Alex Elder <elder@xxxxxxxxxx> CC: Anton Altaparmakov <anton@xxxxxxxxxx> CC: Ben Myers <bpm@xxxxxxx> CC: Chris Mason <chris.mason@xxxxxxxxxx> CC: cluster-devel@xxxxxxxxxx CC: "David S. Miller" <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> CC: fuse-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx CC: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@xxxxxxxxxxxx> CC: Joel Becker <jlbec@xxxxxxxxxxxx> CC: KONISHI Ryusuke <konishi.ryusuke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> CC: linux-btrfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx CC: linux-ext4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx CC: linux-nfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx CC: linux-nilfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx CC: linux-ntfs-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx CC: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@xxxxxxxx> CC: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@xxxxxxxxxx> CC: ocfs2-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx CC: OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> CC: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@xxxxxxxxxx> CC: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@xxxxxxx> CC: xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html