linux-ext4 - Re: Locking for RENAME

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Date:   Thu, 25 May 2023 11:44:41 +0200
From:   Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
To:     Miklos Szeredi <miklos@...redi.hu>
Cc:     Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
        "Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@...nel.org>, Ted Tso <tytso@....edu>,
        Amir Goldstein <amir73il@...il.com>,
        'David Laight <David.Laight@...lab.com>,
        Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        Christian Brauner <brauner@...nel.org>,
        linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, linux-xfs@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Locking for RENAME_EXCHANGE

On Wed 24-05-23 21:33:07, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> On Wed, 24 May 2023 at 18:35, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz> wrote:
> >
> > Hello!
> >
> > This is again about the problem with directory renames I've already
> > reported in [1]. To quickly sum it up some filesystems (so far we know at
> > least about xfs, ext4, udf, reiserfs) need to lock the directory when it is
> > being renamed into another directory. This is because we need to update the
> > parent pointer in the directory in that case and if that races with other
> > operation on the directory, bad things can happen.
> >
> > So far we've done the locking in the filesystem code but recently Darrick
> > pointed out [2] that we've missed the RENAME_EXCHANGE case in our ext4 fix.
> > That one is particularly nasty because RENAME_EXCHANGE can arbitrarily mix
> > regular files and directories. Couple nasty arising cases:
> >
> > 1) We need to additionally lock two exchanged directories. Suppose a
> > situation like:
> >
> > mkdir P; mkdir P/A; mkdir P/B; touch P/B/F
> >
> > CPU1                                            CPU2
> > renameat2("P/A", "P/B", RENAME_EXCHANGE);       renameat2("P/B/F", "P/A", 0);
> 
> Not sure I get it.
> 
> CPU1 locks P then A then B
> CPU2 locks P then B then A
> 
> Both start with P and after that ordering between A and B doesn't
> matter as long as the topology stays the same, which is guaranteed.
> 
> Or did you mean renameat2("P/B/F", "P/A/F", 0);?
> 
> This indeed looks deadlocky.

Right, that is what I meant. Sorry for confusion.

> > Both operations need to lock A and B directories which are unrelated in the
> > tree. This means we must establish stable lock ordering on directory locks
> > even for the case when they are not in ancestor relationship.
> >
> > 2) We may need to lock a directory and a non-directory and they can be in
> > parent-child relationship when hardlinks are involved:
> >
> > mkdir A; mkdir B; touch A/F; ln A/F B/F
> > renameat2("A/F", "B");
> >
> > And this is really nasty because we don't have a way to find out whether
> > "A/F" and "B" are in any relationship - in particular whether B happens to
> > be another parent of A/F or not.
> >
> > What I've decided to do is to make sure we always lock directory first in
> > this mixed case and that *should* avoid all the deadlocks but I'm spelling
> > this out here just in case people can think of some even more wicked case
> > before I'll send patches.
> 
> Locking directories first has always been the case, described in
> detail in Documentation/filesystems/directory-locking.rst
> 
> > Also I wanted to ask (Miklos in particular as RENAME_EXCHANGE author): Why
> > do we lock non-directories in RENAME_EXCHANGE case? If we didn't have to do
> > that things would be somewhat simpler...
> 
> I can't say I remember anything, but digging into
> lock_two_nondirectories() this comes up quickly:
> 
>   6cedba8962f4 ("vfs: take i_mutex on renamed file")
> 
> So apparently NFS is relying on i_mutex to prevent delegations from
> being broken without its knowledge.  Might be that is't NFS only, and
> then the RENAME_EXCHANGE case doesn't need it (NFS doesn't support
> RENAME_EXCHANGE), but I can't say for sure.
> 
> Also Al seems to have had some thoughts on this in d42b386834ee
> ("update D/f/directory-locking")

Thanks for the references. I've now updated the document
Documentation/filesystems/directory-locking.rst and I'm now more convinced
the scheme is correct. It is also kind of neat there are less special cases
:).

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@...e.com>
SUSE Labs, CR