On Wed, Oct 06, 2010 at 05:56:36PM -0400, Stefan Berger wrote:
V2: remove the locks from qemudVMFilterRebuild & umlVMFilterRebuild
This is from a bug report and conversation on IRC where Soren reported that while a filter update is occurring on one or more VMs (due to a rule having been edited for example), a deadlock can occur when a VM referencing a filter is started.
The problem is caused by the two locking sequences of
qemu driver, qemu domain, filter # for the VM start operation filter, qemu_driver, qemu_domain # for the filter update operation
that obviously don't lock in the same order. The problem is the 2nd lock sequence. Here the qemu_driver lock is being grabbed in qemu_driver:qemudVMFilterRebuild()
The following solution is based on the idea of trying to re-arrange the 2nd sequence of locks as follows:
qemu_driver, filter, qemu_driver, qemu_domain
and making the qemu driver recursively lockable so that a second lock can occur, this would then lead to the following net-locking sequence
qemu_driver, filter, qemu_domain
where the 2nd qemu_driver lock has been ( logically ) eliminated.
The 2nd part of the idea is that the sequence of locks (filter, qemu_domain) and (qemu_domain, filter) becomes interchangeable if all code paths where filter AND qemu_domain are locked have a preceding qemu_domain lock that basically blocks their concurrent execution
I'm not entirely happy with this locking scheme, because the broken lock ordering problem is still present. We're just relying on the fact that we retain the global lock to protect us against the ongoing lock ordering issue. That said, I don't see any immediately obvious alternative to solve this problem. So I guess I'll ack this approach for now. One day this will likely need re-visiting... Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://deltacloud.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|