[Cluster-devel] [PATCH v6 10/19] gfs2: Introduce flag for glock holder auto-demotion

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 05:18:12PM +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 10:14 AM Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho at redhat.com> wrote:
> > If the goal here is just to allow the glock to be held for a longer
> > period of time, but with occasional interruptions to prevent
> > starvation, then we have a potential model for this. There is
> > cond_resched_lock() which does this for spin locks.
> 
> This isn't an appropriate model for what I'm trying to achieve here.
> In the cond_resched case, we know at the time of the cond_resched call
> whether or not we want to schedule. If we do, we want to drop the spin
> lock, schedule, and then re-acquire the spin lock. In the case we're
> looking at here, we want to fault in user pages. There is no way of
> knowing beforehand if the glock we're currently holding will have to
> be dropped to achieve that. In fact, it will almost never have to be
> dropped. But if it does, we need to drop it straight away to allow the
> conflicting locking request to succeed.

It occurs to me that this is similar to the wound/wait mutexes
(include/linux/ww_mutex.h & Documentation/locking/ww-mutex-design.rst).
You want to mark the glock as woundable before faulting, and then discover
if it was wounded after faulting.  Maybe sharing this terminology will
aid in understanding?