Hello, On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 02:09:41PM +0000, Bart Van Assche wrote: > On Thu, 2018-07-26 at 06:35 -0700, Tejun Heo wrote: > > Making removal asynchronous this way sometimes causes issues because > > whether the user sees the device released or not is racy. > > kernfs/sysfs have mechanisms to deal with these cases - remove_self > > and kernfs_break_active_protection(). Have you looked at those? > > Hello Tejun, > > The call stack in the patch description shows that sdev_store_delete() is > involved in the deadlock. The implementation of that function is as follows: > > static ssize_t > sdev_store_delete(struct device *dev, struct device_attribute *attr, > const char *buf, size_t count) > { > if (device_remove_file_self(dev, attr)) > scsi_remove_device(to_scsi_device(dev)); > return count; > }; > > device_remove_file_self() calls sysfs_remove_file_self() and that last > function calls kernfs_remove_self(). In other words, kernfs_remove_self() > is already being used. Please let me know if I misunderstood your comment. So, here, because scsi_remove_device() is the one involved in the circular dependency, just breaking the dependency chain on the file itself (self removal) isn't enough. You can wrap the whole operation with kernfs_break_active_protection() to also move scsi_remove_device() invocation outside the kernfs synchronization. This will need to be piped through sysfs but shouldn't be too complex. Thanks. -- tejun