Herbert Poetzl <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 07:23:55AM +0200, Paweł Sikora wrote: >> On Sunday 23 of September 2012 18:10:30 Linus Torvalds wrote: >>> On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 11:09 PM, Paweł Sikora <pluto@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >>>> br_read_lock(vfsmount_lock); > >>> The vfsmount_lock is a "local-global" lock, where a read-lock >>> is rather cheap and takes just a per-cpu lock, but the >>> downside is that a write-lock is *very* expensive, and can >>> cause serious trouble. > >>> And the write lock is taken by the [un]mount() paths. Do *not* >>> do crazy things. If you do some insane "unmount and remount >>> autofs" on a 1s granularity, you're doing insane things. > >>> Why do you have that 1s timeout? Insane. > >> 1s unmount timeout is *only* for fast bug reproduction (in few >> seconds after opteron startup) and testing potential patches. >> normally with 60s timeout it happens in few minutes..hours >> (depends on machine i/o+cpu load) and makes server unusable >> (permament soft-lockup). > >> can we redesign vserver's mnt_is_reachable() for better locking >> to avoid total soft-lockup? > > currently we do: > > br_read_lock(&vfsmount_lock); > root = current->fs->root; > root_mnt = real_mount(root.mnt); > point = root.dentry; > > while ((mnt != mnt->mnt_parent) && (mnt != root_mnt)) { > point = mnt->mnt_mountpoint; > mnt = mnt->mnt_parent; > } > > ret = (mnt == root_mnt) && is_subdir(point, root.dentry); > br_read_unlock(&vfsmount_lock); > > and we have been considering to move the br_read_unlock() > right before the is_subdir() call > > if there are any suggestions how to achieve the same > with less locking I'm all ears ... Herbert, why do you need to filter the mounts that show up in a mount namespace at all? I would think a far more performant and simpler solution would be to just use mount namespaces without unwanted mounts. I'd like to blame this on the silly rcu_barrier in deactivate_locked_super that should really be in the module remove path, but that happens after we drop the br_write_lock. The kernel take br_read_lock(&vfs_mount_lokck) during every rcu path lookup so mnt_is_reachable isn't particular crazy just for taking the lock. I am with Linus on this one. Paweł even 60s for your mount timeout looks too short for your workload. All of the readers that take br_read_lock(&vfsmount_lock) seem to be showing up in your oops. The only thing that seems to make sense is you have a lot of unmount activity running back to back, keeping the lock write held. The only other possible culprit I can see is that it looks like mnt_is_reachable changes reading /proc/mounts to be something worse than linear in the number of mounts and reading /proc/mounts starts taking the vfsmount_lock. All minor things but when you are pushing things hard they look like things that would add up. Eric -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html