xfs: introduce inode cluster buffer trylocks for xfs_iflush

There is an ABBA deadlock between synchronous inode flushing in
xfs_reclaim_inode and xfs_icluster_free. xfs_icluster_free locks the
buffer, then takes inode ilocks, whilst synchronous reclaim takes
the ilock followed by the buffer lock in xfs_iflush().

To avoid this deadlock, separate the inode cluster buffer locking
semantics from the synchronous inode flush semantics, allowing
callers to attempt to lock the buffer but still issue synchronous IO
if it can get the buffer. This requires xfs_iflush() calls that
currently use non-blocking semantics to pass SYNC_TRYLOCK rather
than 0 as the flags parameter.

This allows xfs_reclaim_inode to avoid the deadlock on the buffer
lock and detect the failure so that it can drop the inode ilock and
restart the reclaim attempt on the inode. This allows
xfs_ifree_cluster to obtain the inode lock, mark the inode stale and
release it and hence defuse the deadlock situation. It also has the
pleasant side effect of avoiding IO in xfs_reclaim_inode when it
tries to next reclaim the inode as it is now marked stale.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c b/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c
index fd4f398bd6f1..46cc40131d4a 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c
@@ -760,11 +760,11 @@ xfs_inode_item_push(
          * Push the inode to it's backing buffer. This will not remove the
          * inode from the AIL - a further push will be required to trigger a
          * buffer push. However, this allows all the dirty inodes to be pushed
-         * to the buffer before it is pushed to disk. THe buffer IO completion
-         * will pull th einode from the AIL, mark it clean and unlock the flush
+         * to the buffer before it is pushed to disk. The buffer IO completion
+         * will pull the inode from the AIL, mark it clean and unlock the flush
          * lock.
          */
-        (void) xfs_iflush(ip, 0);
+        (void) xfs_iflush(ip, SYNC_TRYLOCK);
         xfs_iunlock(ip, XFS_ILOCK_SHARED);
 }