Re: upcalls from kernel code to user space daemons

[Steve French <smfltc@us.ibm.com>]

On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 16:40, Oliver Neukum wrote:
> > > 1) getHostByName:  when the kernel cifs code detects a server crashes
> > > and fails reconnecting the socket and the kernel code wants to see if
> > > the hostname now has a new ip address.
> 
> Is that possible at all? It looks like that might deadlock in the page
> out code path.
> 

Yes - since an upcall (indirectly) to a different process while in write
could cause writepage to write out memory to a mount - which could hang
if on an already dead tcp session, this (reconnection - failover to new
ip address if the server ip address changes after failure) may be too
risky to do in the context of writepage, but there may be a way to keep
refusing to do writepage while in the midst of this harder form of mount
reconnection - which isn't likely to be any worse than not
reconnecting.  Fortunately, most tcp reconnection cases are much
simpler.