kobject: don't block for each kobject_uevent

Currently kobject_uevent has somewhat unpredictable semantics.  The
point is, since it may call a usermode helper and wait for it to execute
(UMH_WAIT_EXEC), it is impossible to say for sure what lock dependencies
it will introduce for the caller - strictly speaking it depends on what
fs the binary is located on and the set of locks fork may take.  There
are quite a few kobject_uevent's users that do not take this into
account and call it with various mutexes taken, e.g.  rtnl_mutex,
net_mutex, which might potentially lead to a deadlock.

Since there is actually no reason to wait for the usermode helper to
execute there, let's make kobject_uevent start the helper asynchronously
with the aid of the UMH_NO_WAIT flag.

Personally, I'm interested in this, because I really want kobject_uevent
to be called under the slab_mutex in the slub implementation as it used
to be some time ago, because it greatly simplifies synchronization and
automatically fixes a kmemcg-related race.  However, there was a
deadlock detected on an attempt to call kobject_uevent under the
slab_mutex (see https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/14/45), which was reported
to be fixed by releasing the slab_mutex for kobject_uevent.

Unfortunately, there was no information about who exactly blocked on the
slab_mutex causing the usermode helper to stall, neither have I managed
to find this out or reproduce the issue.

BTW, this is not the first attempt to make kobject_uevent use
UMH_NO_WAIT.  Previous one was made by commit f520360d93cd ("kobject:
don't block for each kobject_uevent"), but it was wrong (it passed
arguments allocated on stack to async thread) so it was reverted in
05f54c13cd0c ("Revert "kobject: don't block for each kobject_uevent".").
It targeted on speeding up the boot process though.

Signed-off-by: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov@parallels.com>
Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/kobject.h b/include/linux/kobject.h
index 926afb6f6b5f..f896a33e8341 100644
--- a/include/linux/kobject.h
+++ b/include/linux/kobject.h
@@ -119,6 +119,7 @@ struct kobj_type {
 };
 
 struct kobj_uevent_env {
+	char *argv[3];
 	char *envp[UEVENT_NUM_ENVP];
 	int envp_idx;
 	char buf[UEVENT_BUFFER_SIZE];