Re: [PATCH 00/12] Removal of Aiocontext lock through drains: protect bdrv_replace_child_noperm.

[Emanuele Giuseppe Esposito]

On 27/01/2022 14:46, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 1/26/22 12:29, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> Still, I'm a bit surprised I didn't notice any
>> aio_context_acquire/release() removals in this patch series because I
>> thought callers need that before they switch to
>> BDRV_POLL_WHILE_UNLOCKED()?
> 
> I think the callers are new and were not calling
> bdrv_subtree_drained_begin() (and thus BDRV_POLL_WHILE) at all?
> 
> Emanuele, enlighten us. :)

Yes, the callers were not calling any kind of drains (or at least most
of them) *and* no context lock was acquired before calling them.

The current logic (or at least how I see it) when draining is:
"ok, we need to use bdrv_drain or bdrv_subtree_drain, but these function
call BDRV_POLL_WHILE(), which in turns calls AIO_WAIT_WHILE and thus
performs aio_context_release(lock); [...] aio_context_acquire(lock);
*Therefore* we need to acquire the lock". The lock is taken as a
consequence of the drain implementation.
This makes the lock usage useless, because we are just blindly acquiring
it for the purpose of making BDRV_POLL_WHILE happy.

On the other side, here no lock was acquired before, and
BDRV_POLL_WHILE_UNLOCKED is not releasing anything, thus no lock is needed.

This seems to hold and kinda proves my logic above.

Thank you,
Emanuele