filesystem freeze: allow SysRq emergency thaw to thaw frozen filesystems

Now that the filesystem freeze operation has been elevated to the VFS, and
is just an ioctl away, some sort of safety net for unintentionally frozen
root filesystems may be in order.

The timeout thaw originally proposed did not get merged, but perhaps
something like this would be useful in emergencies.

For example, freeze /path/to/mountpoint may freeze your root filesystem if
you forgot that you had that unmounted.

I chose 'j' as the last remaining character other than 'h' which is sort
of reserved for help (because help is generated on any unknown character).

I've tested this on a non-root fs with multiple (nested) freezers, as well
as on a system rendered unresponsive due to a frozen root fs.

[randy.dunlap@oracle.com: emergency thaw only if CONFIG_BLOCK enabled]
Signed-off-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
Cc: Takashi Sato <t-sato@yk.jp.nec.com>
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index 87e7bfc5ebd7..61211ad823fe 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -1878,6 +1878,7 @@ extern struct block_device *open_by_devnum(dev_t, fmode_t);
 extern void invalidate_bdev(struct block_device *);
 extern int sync_blockdev(struct block_device *bdev);
 extern struct super_block *freeze_bdev(struct block_device *);
+extern void emergency_thaw_all(void);
 extern int thaw_bdev(struct block_device *bdev, struct super_block *sb);
 extern int fsync_bdev(struct block_device *);
 extern int fsync_super(struct super_block *);