xfs: xlog_cil_force_lsn doesn't always wait correctly

When running a tight mount/unmount loop on an older kernel, RedHat
QE found that unmount would occasionally hang in
xfs_buf_unpin_wait() on the superblock buffer. Tracing and other
debug work by Eric Sandeen indicated that it was hanging on the
writing of the superblock during unmount immediately after logging
the superblock counters in a synchronous transaction. Further debug
indicated that the synchronous transaction was not waiting for
completion correctly, and we narrowed it down to
xlog_cil_force_lsn() returning NULLCOMMITLSN and hence not pushing
the transaction in the iclog buffer to disk correctly.

While this unmount superblock write code is now very different in
mainline kernels, the xlog_cil_force_lsn() code is identical, and it
was bisected to the backport of commit f876e44 ("xfs: always do log
forces via the workqueue"). This commit made the CIL push
asynchronous for log forces and hence exposed a race condition that
couldn't occur on a synchronous push.

Essentially, the xlog_cil_force_lsn() relied implicitly on the fact
that the sequence push would be complete by the time
xlog_cil_push_now() returned, resulting in the context being pushed
being in the committing list. When it was made asynchronous, it was
recognised that there was a race condition in detecting whether an
asynchronous push has started or not and code was added to handle
it.

Unfortunately, the fix was not quite right and left a race condition
where it it would detect an empty CIL while a push was in progress
before the context had been added to the committing list. This was
incorrectly seen as a "nothing to do" condition and so would tell
xfs_log_force_lsn() that there is nothing to wait for, and hence it
would push the iclogbufs in memory.

The fix is simple, but explaining the logic and the race condition
is a lot more complex. The fix is to add the context to the
committing list before we start emptying the CIL. This allows us to
detect the difference between an empty "do nothing" push and a push
that has not started by adding a discrete "emptying the CIL" state
to avoid the transient, incorrect "empty" condition that the
(unchanged) waiting code was seeing.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions