On Tue, 30 Jan 2024 at 18:46, Al Viro <v...@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote: > > What's to stop ->d_revalidate() from being called in parallel with > __dentry_kill()?
Oh, you're right. For some reason I thought we did the d_release() _after_ the RCU grace period, but we don't. Why don't we, btw? It would be so much better if we did the d_release() from __d_free(). We have all that smarts in fs/dcache.c to decide if we need to RCU-delay it or not, and then we don't let filesystems use it. I assume the reason is that some 'd_delete' cases might want to sleep etc. Still, for things like this that just want to release memory, it would be *much* better to have d_release called when the dentry is actually released. Hmm. Not very many d_delete cases, but I did see a couple that definitely want process context (dma_buf_release goes to things that do vfree() etc). So I guess the "make low-level filesystems do their own kfree_rcu() is what we're doing. In this case it's as simple as doing that - kfree(ei); + kfree_rcu(ei, rcu); and we'd just make the rcu entry a union with something that isn't that 'is_freed' field so that it doesn't take more space. Linus