vfs, fscache: Implement pinning of cache usage for writeback
authorDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Wed, 20 Oct 2021 22:50:01 +0000 (23:50 +0100)
committerDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Fri, 7 Jan 2022 09:22:19 +0000 (09:22 +0000)
commit08276bdae68b022a7726edf7416b6748e3df5395
tree638f9348fcc0824203657538374376b0aa588c20
parentb6e16652d6c0e4f9e9b120f66966ec153f0623fc
vfs, fscache: Implement pinning of cache usage for writeback

Cachefiles has a problem in that it needs to keep the backing file for a
cookie open whilst there are local modifications pending that need to be
written to it.  However, we don't want to keep the file open indefinitely,
as that causes EMFILE/ENFILE/ENOMEM problems.

Reopening the cache file, however, is a problem if this is being done due
to writeback triggered by exit().  Some filesystems will oops if we try to
open a file in that context because they want to access current->fs or
other resources that have already been dismantled.

To get around this, I added the following:

 (1) An inode flag, I_PINNING_FSCACHE_WB, to be set on a network filesystem
     inode to indicate that we have a usage count on the cookie caching
     that inode.

 (2) A flag in struct writeback_control, unpinned_fscache_wb, that is set
     when __writeback_single_inode() clears the last dirty page from
     i_pages - at which point it clears I_PINNING_FSCACHE_WB and sets this
     flag.

     This has to be done here so that clearing I_PINNING_FSCACHE_WB can be
     done atomically with the check of PAGECACHE_TAG_DIRTY that clears
     I_DIRTY_PAGES.

 (3) A function, fscache_set_page_dirty(), which if it is not set, sets
     I_PINNING_FSCACHE_WB and calls fscache_use_cookie() to pin the cache
     resources.

 (4) A function, fscache_unpin_writeback(), to be called by ->write_inode()
     to unuse the cookie.

 (5) A function, fscache_clear_inode_writeback(), to be called when the
     inode is evicted, before clear_inode() is called.  This cleans up any
     lingering I_PINNING_FSCACHE_WB.

The network filesystem can then use these tools to make sure that
fscache_write_to_cache() can write locally modified data to the cache as
well as to the server.

For the future, I'm working on write helpers for netfs lib that should
allow this facility to be removed by keeping track of the dirty regions
separately - but that's incomplete at the moment and is also going to be
affected by folios, one way or another, since it deals with pages

Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>
cc: linux-cachefs@redhat.com
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/163819615157.215744.17623791756928043114.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/163906917856.143852.8224898306177154573.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/163967124567.1823006.14188359004568060298.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/164021524705.640689.17824932021727663017.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk/
fs/fs-writeback.c
fs/fscache/io.c
include/linux/fs.h
include/linux/fscache.h
include/linux/writeback.h