• Benjamin Marzinski's avatar
    GFS2: remove transaction glock · 24972557
    Benjamin Marzinski authored
    GFS2 has a transaction glock, which must be grabbed for every
    transaction, whose purpose is to deal with freezing the filesystem.
    Aside from this involving a large amount of locking, it is very easy to
    make the current fsfreeze code hang on unfreezing.
    
    This patch rewrites how gfs2 handles freezing the filesystem. The
    transaction glock is removed. In it's place is a freeze glock, which is
    cached (but not held) in a shared state by every node in the cluster
    when the filesystem is mounted. This lock only needs to be grabbed on
    freezing, and actions which need to be safe from freezing, like
    recovery.
    
    When a node wants to freeze the filesystem, it grabs this glock
    exclusively.  When the freeze glock state changes on the nodes (either
    from shared to unlocked, or shared to exclusive), the filesystem does a
    special log flush.  gfs2_log_flush() does all the work for flushing out
    the and shutting down the incore log, and then it tries to grab the
    freeze glock in a shared state again.  Since the filesystem is stuck in
    gfs2_log_flush, no new transaction can start, and nothing can be written
    to disk. Unfreezing the filesytem simply involes dropping the freeze
    glock, allowing gfs2_log_flush() to grab and then release the shared
    lock, so it is cached for next time.
    
    However, in order for the unfreezing ioctl to occur, gfs2 needs to get a
    shared lock on the filesystem root directory inode to check permissions.
    If that glock has already been grabbed exclusively, fsfreeze will be
    unable to get the shared lock and unfreeze the filesystem.
    
    In order to allow the unfreeze, this patch makes gfs2 grab a shared lock
    on the filesystem root directory during the freeze, and hold it until it
    unfreezes the filesystem.  The functions which need to grab a shared
    lock in order to allow the unfreeze ioctl to be issued now use the lock
    grabbed by the freeze code instead.
    
    The freeze and unfreeze code take care to make sure that this shared
    lock will not be dropped while another process is using it.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarBenjamin Marzinski <bmarzins@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
    24972557
log.h 2.4 KB