Subject: Re: linux-next: JFFS2 deadlock

From: Al Viro <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:27:55 +0000

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 10:17:04AM +1100, Stephen Rothwell wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> On Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:54:56 +0000 Mark Jackson <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >
> > Just tested the current next-20130226 on a custom AM335X board, and I received the JFFS2 deadlock shown below.
> 
> Is this new today?  is it reproducible? Does if ail for Linus' tree?
> 
> Al, could this be something to do with the new stuff in the vfs tree?

Very unlikely.  jffs2_readdir() does, indeed, grab ->sem on the inode in
question and then calls the callback (which might fault, grabbing ->mmap_sem).
Had been doing that all along.  And if the userland area we are doing
getdents(2) into had been mmapped from jffs2 file, jffs2_readpage() would
be called, which would grab ->sem on the inode of file mmaped in there.
Again, that had been going on all along.  Unlike the situation with ->i_mutex,
this one is probably a false positive - ->sem on directories nests outside of
->mmap_sem, ->sem on non-directories - inside.  But that false positive
shouldn't be something new; hell, both paths are present in 2.6.12 with
the lock orders as in the current tree (except that ->sem used to be
a semaphore instead of a mutex).