Hmm, thinking I'd better just take a hammer to this inotify problem
despite the fact I cannot confirm the root cause of the warning messages.
Possibilities include the race being fixed here, and races in the
debug code itself.

--

There is a race between setting an inode's children's "parent watched" flag
when placing the first watch on a parent, and instantiating new children of
that parent: a child could miss having its flags set by set_dentry_child_flags,
but then inotify_d_instantiate might still see !inotify_inode_watched.

The solution is to set_dentry_child_flags after adding the watch. Locking is
taken care of, because both set_dentry_child_flags and inotify_d_instantiate
hold dcache_lock and child->d_locks.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---
Index: linux-2.6/fs/inotify.c
===================================================================
--- linux-2.6.orig/fs/inotify.c
+++ linux-2.6/fs/inotify.c
@@ -627,6 +627,7 @@ s32 inotify_add_watch(struct inotify_han
                      struct inode *inode, u32 mask)
 {
        int ret = 0;
+       int newly_watched;
 
        /* don't allow invalid bits: we don't want flags set */
        mask &= IN_ALL_EVENTS | IN_ONESHOT;
@@ -653,12 +654,18 @@ s32 inotify_add_watch(struct inotify_han
         */
        watch->inode = igrab(inode);
 
-       if (!inotify_inode_watched(inode))
-               set_dentry_child_flags(inode, 1);
-
        /* Add the watch to the handle's and the inode's list */
+       newly_watched = !inotify_inode_watched(inode);
        list_add(&watch->h_list, &ih->watches);
        list_add(&watch->i_list, &inode->inotify_watches);
+       /*
+        * Set child flags _after_ adding the watch, so there is no race
+        * windows where newly instantiated children could miss their parent's
+        * watched flag.
+        */
+       if (newly_watched)
+               set_dentry_child_flags(inode, 1);
+
 out:
        mutex_unlock(&ih->mutex);
        mutex_unlock(&inode->inotify_mutex);
-
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