Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 21 May 2009 16:36:10 +0900 | From | Tejun Heo <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 04/20] sysfs: Handle the general case of removing of directories with subdirectories |
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Eric W. Biederman wrote: >> I agree we should be heading this way but what happens to attributes >> or directories living below the subdirectories? If it's gonna handle >> recursive case, I think it better do it properly. I had patches of >> similar effect. > > I do handle it properly. sysfs_get_one finds the deepest child of the > first directory entry. Then I remove it. And I repeat until done. > > The locking is correct, something that is much more difficult to > tell with your version.
Why? :-)
> By grabbing and dropping the sysfs_mutex things are simpler, and they > get even simpler in future patches. > > Now looking at that code in detail there is a question of what happens if > we add a directory entry while we are recursively deleting a directory. > Neither your patch, my patch, nor the existing code handle that case > (assuming the sysfs_dirent) was looked up before it is removed from it's > parent directory. I expect another patch is called for to plug that > theoretical gap. > > I expect the way to close that hole is to have an extra flag that says > we are removing a directory entry and refuse to add if that flag is > set. > > I would prefer to only remove empty directories. But when I > instrumented things up I found cases where that does indeed happen.
IIRC, my version did the whole thing while holding sysfs_mutex, so it's safe against such races. I can't really see why ops like this can't be atomic in sysfs. I don't really care how things are done but please make it atomic.
Thanks.
-- tejun
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