From 4ff36ee94d93ddb4b7846177f1118d9aa33408e2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jason Baron Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2014 12:58:54 -0800 Subject: epoll: do not take the nested ep->mtx on EPOLL_CTL_DEL The EPOLL_CTL_DEL path of epoll contains a classic, ab-ba deadlock. That is, epoll_ctl(a, EPOLL_CTL_DEL, b, x), will deadlock with epoll_ctl(b, EPOLL_CTL_DEL, a, x). The deadlock was introduced with commmit 67347fe4e632 ("epoll: do not take global 'epmutex' for simple topologies"). The acquistion of the ep->mtx for the destination 'ep' was added such that a concurrent EPOLL_CTL_ADD operation would see the correct state of the ep (Specifically, the check for '!list_empty(&f.file->f_ep_links') However, by simply not acquiring the lock, we do not serialize behind the ep->mtx from the add path, and thus may perform a full path check when if we had waited a little longer it may not have been necessary. However, this is a transient state, and performing the full loop checking in this case is not harmful. The important point is that we wouldn't miss doing the full loop checking when required, since EPOLL_CTL_ADD always locks any 'ep's that its operating upon. The reason we don't need to do lock ordering in the add path, is that we are already are holding the global 'epmutex' whenever we do the double lock. Further, the original posting of this patch, which was tested for the intended performance gains, did not perform this additional locking. Signed-off-by: Jason Baron Cc: Nathan Zimmer Cc: Eric Wong Cc: Nelson Elhage Cc: Al Viro Cc: Davide Libenzi Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- fs/eventpoll.c | 4 ---- 1 file changed, 4 deletions(-) (limited to 'fs') diff --git a/fs/eventpoll.c b/fs/eventpoll.c index 8b5e2584c84..af903128891 100644 --- a/fs/eventpoll.c +++ b/fs/eventpoll.c @@ -1907,10 +1907,6 @@ SYSCALL_DEFINE4(epoll_ctl, int, epfd, int, op, int, fd, } } } - if (op == EPOLL_CTL_DEL && is_file_epoll(tf.file)) { - tep = tf.file->private_data; - mutex_lock_nested(&tep->mtx, 1); - } /* * Try to lookup the file inside our RB tree, Since we grabbed "mtx" -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2