On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 6:30 AM, Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Great... OK, saner splitup of that sucker (equivalent to combination of > these two patches) is in vfs.git#for-linus. > > Review and testing would be very welcome. So looking at the "dealing with the rest of shrink_dentry_list() livelock" patch, I think the "release the parents" case is now big and complicated enough to be split into a function of its own. However, I have a bigger question too: the "release the parent" case _should_ be possible to do with just a "dput()" on the parent, and the only reason we're doing the special case is that since we are shrinking things, we try to be more aggressive and shrink all the parents if possible. Right? If so, though, that brings up two questions: (a) do we really want to be that aggressive? Can we ever traverse _past_ the point we're actually trying to shrink in shrink_dcache_parent()? (b) why does the "dput()" (or rather, the dentry_kill()) locking logic have to retain the old trylock case rather than share the parent locking logic? I'm assuming the answer to (b) is that we can't afford to drop the dentry lock in dentry_kill(), but I'd like that answer to the "Why" to be documented somewhere. I don't much care what the answer to (a) is, but again, it would be good to have that mentioned somewhere. 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