On Sat, Jun 29, 2019 at 05:38:03AM +0100, Al Viro wrote:

> PS: the problem is not gone in the next iteration of the patchset in
> question.  The patch I'm proposing (including dput_to_list() and _ONLY_
> compile-tested) follows.  Comments?

FWIW, there's another unpleasantness in the whole thing.  Suppose we have
picked a page full of dentries, all with refcount 0.  We decide to
evict all of them.  As it turns out, they are from two filesystems.
Filesystem 1 is NFS on a server, with currently downed hub on the way
to it.  Filesystem 2 is local.  We attempt to evict an NFS dentry and
get stuck - tons of dirty data with no way to flush them on server.
In the meanwhile, admin tries to unmount the local filesystem.  And
gets stuck as well, since umount can't do anything to its dentries
that happen to sit in our shrink list.

I wonder if the root of problem here isn't in shrink_dcache_for_umount();
all it really needs is to have everything on that fs with refcount 0
dragged through __dentry_kill().  If something had been on a shrink
list, __dentry_kill() will just leave behind a struct dentry completely
devoid of any connection to superblock, other dentries, filesystem
type, etc. - it's just a piece of memory that won't be freed until
the owner of shrink list finally gets around to it.  Which can happen
at any point - all they'll do to it is dentry_free(), and that doesn't
need any fs-related data structures.

The logics in shrink_dcache_parent() is
        collect everything evictable into a shrink list
        if anything found - kick it out and repeat the scan
        otherwise, if something had been on other's shrink list
                repeat the scan

I wonder if after the "no evictable candidates, but something
on other's shrink lists" we ought to do something along the
lines of
        rcu_read_lock
        walk it, doing
                if dentry has zero refcount
                        if it's not on a shrink list,
                                move it to ours
                        else
                                store its address in 'victim'
                                end the walk
        if no victim found
                rcu_read_unlock
        else
                lock victim for __dentry_kill
                rcu_read_unlock
                if it's still alive
                        if it's not IS_ROOT
                                if parent is not on shrink list
                                        decrement parent's refcount
                                        put it on our list
                                else
                                        decrement parent's refcount
                        __dentry_kill(victim)
                else
                        unlock
        if our list is non-empty
                shrink_dentry_list on it
in there...

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