Some filesystems use a kinda-sorta controlled dentry refcount leak to pin
dentries of created objects in dcache (and undo it when removing those).
Reference is grabbed and not released, but it's not actually _stored_
anywhere.  That works, but it's hard to follow and verify; among other
things, we have no way to tell _which_ of the increments is intended
to be an unpaired one.  Worse, on removal we need to decide whether
the reference had already been dropped, which can be non-trivial if
that removal is on umount and we need to figure out if this dentry is
pinned due to e.g. unlink() not done.  Usually that is handled by using
kill_litter_super() as ->kill_sb(), but there are open-coded special
cases of the same (consider e.g. /proc/self).

Things get simpler if we introduce a new dentry flag (DCACHE_PERSISTENT)
marking those "leaked" dentries.  Having it set claims responsibility
for +1 in refcount.

The end result this series is aiming for:

* get these unbalanced dget() and dput() replaced with new primitives that
  would, in addition to adjusting refcount, set and clear persistency flag.
* instead of having kill_litter_super() mess with removing the remaining
  "leaked" references (e.g. for all tmpfs files that hadn't been removed
  prior to umount), have the regular shrink_dcache_for_umount() strip
  DCACHE_PERSISTENT of all dentries, dropping the corresponding
  reference if it had been set.  After that kill_litter_super() becomes
  an equivalent of kill_anon_super().

Doing that in a single step is not feasible - it would affect too many places
in too many filesystems.  It has to be split into a series.

This work has really started early in 2024; quite a few preliminary pieces
have already gone into mainline.  This chunk is finally getting to the
meat of that stuff - infrastructure and most of the conversions to it.

Some pieces are still sitting in the local branches, but the bulk of
that stuff is here.

Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
d_make_discardable(): warn if given a non-persistent dentry

At this point there are very few call chains that might lead to
d_make_discardable() on a dentry that hadn't been made persistent:
calls of simple_unlink() and simple_rmdir() in configfs and
apparmorfs.

Both filesystems do pin (part of) their contents in dcache, but
they are currently playing very unusual games with that.  Converting
them to more usual patterns might be possible, but it's definitely
going to be a long series of changes in both cases.

For now the easiest solution is to have both stop using simple_unlink()
and simple_rmdir() - that allows to make d_make_discardable() warn
when given a non-persistent dentry.

Rather than giving them full-blown private copies (with calls of
d_make_discardable() replaced with dput()), let's pull the parts of
simple_unlink() and simple_rmdir() that deal with timestamps and link
counts into separate helpers (__simple_unlink() and __simple_rmdir()
resp.) and have those used by configfs and apparmorfs.

Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
6 files changed