bcachefs: Deadlock cycle detector

We've outgrown our own deadlock avoidance strategy.

The btree iterator API provides an interface where the user doesn't need
to concern themselves with lock ordering - different btree iterators can
be traversed in any order. Without special care, this will lead to
deadlocks.

Our previous strategy was to define a lock ordering internally, and
whenever we attempt to take a lock and trylock() fails, we'd check if
the current btree transaction is holding any locks that cause a lock
ordering violation. If so, we'd issue a transaction restart, and then
bch2_trans_begin() would re-traverse all previously used iterators, but
in the correct order.

That approach had some issues, though.
 - Sometimes we'd issue transaction restarts unnecessarily, when no
   deadlock would have actually occured. Lock ordering restarts have
   become our primary cause of transaction restarts, on some workloads
   totally 20% of actual transaction commits.

 - To avoid deadlock or livelock, we'd often have to take intent locks
   when we only wanted a read lock: with the lock ordering approach, it
   is actually illegal to hold _any_ read lock while blocking on an intent
   lock, and this has been causing us unnecessary lock contention.

 - It was getting fragile - the various lock ordering rules are not
   trivial, and we'd been seeing occasional livelock issues related to
   this machinery.

So, since bcachefs is already a relational database masquerading as a
filesystem, we're stealing the next traditional database technique and
switching to a cycle detector for avoiding deadlocks.

When we block taking a btree lock, after adding ourself to the waitlist
but before sleeping, we do a DFS of btree transactions waiting on other
btree transactions, starting with the current transaction and walking
our held locks, and transactions blocking on our held locks.

If we find a cycle, we emit a transaction restart. Occasionally (e.g.
the btree split path) we can not allow the lock() operation to fail, so
if necessary we'll tell another transaction that it has to fail.

Result: trans_restart_would_deadlock events are reduced by a factor of
10 to 100, and we'll be able to delete a whole bunch of grotty, fragile
code.

Signed-off-by: Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@gmail.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/fs/bcachefs/debug.c b/fs/bcachefs/debug.c
index 4fe20d36212e..6944dfef5bcb 100644
--- a/fs/bcachefs/debug.c
+++ b/fs/bcachefs/debug.c
@@ -534,7 +534,7 @@ static ssize_t bch2_btree_transactions_read(struct file *file, char __user *buf,
 
 	mutex_lock(&c->btree_trans_lock);
 	list_for_each_entry(trans, &c->btree_trans_list, list) {
-		if (trans->task->pid <= i->iter)
+		if (trans->locking_wait.task->pid <= i->iter)
 			continue;
 
 		ret = flush_buf(i);
@@ -546,11 +546,11 @@ static ssize_t bch2_btree_transactions_read(struct file *file, char __user *buf,
 		prt_printf(&i->buf, "backtrace:");
 		prt_newline(&i->buf);
 		printbuf_indent_add(&i->buf, 2);
-		prt_backtrace(&i->buf, trans->task);
+		prt_backtrace(&i->buf, trans->locking_wait.task);
 		printbuf_indent_sub(&i->buf, 2);
 		prt_newline(&i->buf);
 
-		i->iter = trans->task->pid;
+		i->iter = trans->locking_wait.task->pid;
 	}
 	mutex_unlock(&c->btree_trans_lock);