Hello, here is the seventh iteration of my patches to improve filesystem freezing. I've rebased patches on top of 3.5-rc2 as Al requested. Otherwise I've just fixed some outdated text in the introduction below and added one ack. Introductory text to first time readers: Filesystem freezing is currently racy and thus we can end up with dirty data on frozen filesystem (see changelog patch 13 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 file_update_time() call to ->page_mkwrite callback (patches 01-07) and put freeze handling in mnt_want_write() / mnt_drop_write(). That however required some code shuffling and changes to kern_path_create() (see patches 09-12). 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. I'm not able to hit any deadlocks, lockdep warnings, or dirty data on frozen filesystem despite beating it with fsstress, bash-shared-mapping, and aio-stress while freezing and unfreezing for several hours (using ext4 and xfs) so I'm reasonably confident this could finally be the right solution. Changes since v6: * rebased on 3.5-rc2 * added ack Changes since v5: * handle unlinked & open files on frozen filesystem * lockdep keys for freeze protection are now per filesystem type * taught lockdep that freeze protection at lower level does not create dependency when we already hold freeze protection at higher level * rebased on 3.5-rc1-ish Changes since v4: * added a couple of Acked-by's * added some comments & doc update * added patches from series "Push file_update_time() into .page_mkwrite" since it doesn't make much sense to keep them separate anymore * rebased on top of 3.4-rc2 Changes since v3: * added third level of freezing for fs internal purposes - hooked some filesystems to use it (XFS, nilfs2) * removed racy i_size check from filemap_mkwrite() 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