The quota code plays interesting games with the lock ordering; to quote Jan:
| i_mutex of inode containing quota file is acquired after all other
| quota locks. i_mutex of all other inodes is acquired before quota
| locks. Quota code makes sure (by resetting inode operations and
| setting special flag on inode) that noone tries to enter quota code
| while holding i_mutex on a quota file...
The good news is that all of this special case i_mutex grabbing happens in the
(per filesystem) low level quota write function. For this special case we
need a new I_MUTEX_* nesting level, since this just entirely outside any of
the regular VFS locking rules for i_mutex. I trust Jan on his blue eyes that
this is not ever going to deadlock; and based on that the patch below is what
it takes to inform lockdep of these very interesting new locking rules.
The new locking rule for the I_MUTEX_QUOTA nesting level is that this is the
deepest possible level of nesting for i_mutex, and that this only should be
used in quota write (and possibly read) function of filesystems. This makes
the lock ordering of the I_MUTEX_* levels:
Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com> Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@ucw.cz> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>