On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > - the shrinker list logic depends on the actual freeing of the dentry > to be delayed until the RCU grace period (already true for RCU-lookup > dentries) Side note: I just unconditionally removed the immediate __d_free() case, but it could as well have become - if (!(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_RCUACCESS)) + if (!(dentry->d_flags & (DCACHE_RCUACCESS|DCACHE_SHRINK_LIST)) __d_free(&dentry->d_u.d_rcu); else call_rcu(&dentry->d_u.d_rcu, __d_free); instead. Anyway, one reason I looked at this is that most of the threads in Mika's NMI watchdog traces were stuck on _raw_spin_lock() in the whole d_walk() thing, and I had a *really* hard time convincing myself that this was all safe without the RCU lock. I'm wondering if Mika perhaps has CONFIG_PREEMPT_RCU set, which means that spinlocks (or the rename_lock sequence lock) do not end up being RCU-safe points. And once I started worrying about that, the whole "ok, who calls dentry_kill() when shrinking races with dput()" question started just making me worry about that whole DCACHE_MAY_FREE thing. Because one of the things that Miklos/Al's series of patches did was to drop some of the RCU locking, since it wasn't "necessary" any more as far as the lru list itself was concerned.. Linus -- 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