Re: [PATCH] make inotify event handles use GFP_NOFS

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Mon Mar 30 2009 - 17:31:22 EST


On Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:27:32 -0400
Eric Paris <eparis@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I think this is a bandaide to shut up lockdep. I could either figure
> out lockdep classes and figure out how to reclassify inotify locks since
> I believe Nick is correct when he says inotify watches pin the inode in
> core so memory pressure can't evict it.

It's pretty sad to degrading the strength of the memory allocation just
to squish a lockdep report.

> I don't want to do that as I
> think the real fix is my next generation fsnotify which does zero
> allocations under locks and so everything can be GFP_KERNEL.

I assume that's the 13-patch series further down in my todo pile.

Perhaps this workaround is suitable for 2.6.29.x, or 2.6.30 if the
13-patch-series was too late. But do we care enough?


> I'm
> posting this as it is clearly safe and should fix the issue.
>
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=123617147432377&w=2
>
> includes a lockdep warning that shows while we are reclaiming FS memory
> and inode may get evicted which generates an IN_IGNORED message. Half
> of that code path already used GFP_NOFS but a second allocation to store
> the filename was using GFP_KERNEL. As a precaution I also moved the
> audit handle_event code path to use GFP_NOFS.
>
> This is much the same as the precaution in f04b30de3c82528 which did
> something similar.
>

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/