[Devel] Re: [PATCH] nfs lockd reclaimer: Convert to kthread API

[Eric W. Biederman]

Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust at fys.uio.no> writes:

> On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 14:40 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> Using signals to communicate with kernel threads is fairly unpleasant, IMO.
>> We have much simpler, faster and more idiomatic ways of communicating
>> between threads in-kernel and there are better ways in which userspace can
>> communicate with the kernel - system calls, for example...
>> 
>> So I think generally any move which gets us away from using signals in
>> kernel threads is moving in a good direction.
>
> I have yet to see a proposal which did. Eric's patch was eliminating
> signals in kernel threads that used them without proposing any
> replacement mechanism or showing that he had plans to do so. That is a
> good reason for a veto.

Possibly I just hadn't looked close enough.  The signals looked like
a redundant mechanism.

>> > > With pid namespaces all kernel threads will disappear so how do
>> > > we cope with the problem when the sysadmin can not see the kernel
>> > > threads?
>> > 
>> > Then you have a usability problem. How does the sysadmin reboot the
>> > system if there is no way to shut down the processes that are hanging on
>> > an unresponsive filesystem?
>> 
>> Where's the hang?  A user process is stuck on h_rwsem?
>> 
>> If so, would it be appropriate to convert the user process to use
>> down_foo_interruptible(), so that the operator can just kill the user
>> process as expected, rather than having to futz around killing kernel
>> threads?
>
> If an NFS server reboots, then the locks held by user processes on the
> client need to be re-established by when it comes up again. Otherwise,
> the processes that thought they were holding locks will suddenly fail.
> This recovery job is currently the done by a kernel thread.
>
> The question is then what to do if the server crashes again while the
> kernel thread is re-establishing the locks. Particularly if it never
> comes back again.
> Currently, the administrator can intervene by killing anything that has
> open files on that volume and kill the recovery kernel thread.
> You'll also note that lockd_down(), nfsd_down() etc all use signals to
> inform lockd(), nfsd() etc that they should be shutting down. Since the
> reclaimer thread is started by the lockd() thread using CLONE_SIGHAND,
> this means that we also automatically kill any lingering recovery
> threads whenever we shutdown lockd().

Maybe I'm missing something but I think you are referring to the semantics
of do_group_exit in the presence of CLONE_THREAD.  All sharing a
sighand should do is cause the sharing of the signal handler.  Causing
allow_signal and disallow_signal to act on a group of threads instead
of a single thread.   I don't recall clone_sighand having any
other effects.

> These mechanisms need to be replaced _before_ we start shooting down
> sigallow() etc in the kernel.

Reasonable if these mechanisms are not redundant.

Thinking it through because everything having to do with nfs mounting and
unmounting is behind the privileged mount operation this is not going to
become an issue until we start allowing unprivileged nfs mounts.  Because
we cannot delegate control of nfs mount and unmount operations until then.

Since signals do not pose a immediate barrier to forward progress like
daemonize and kernel_thread we can leave things as is until we can
sort this out.

Eric
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