C.5. Glock Holders
Table C.5, “Glock holder flags” shows the meanings of the different glock holder flags.
| Flag | Name | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| a | Async | Do not wait for glock result (will poll for result later) |
| A | Any | Any compatible lock mode is acceptable |
| c | No cache | When unlocked, demote DLM lock immediately |
| e | No expire | Ignore subsequent lock cancel requests |
| E | Exact | Must have exact lock mode |
| F | First | Set when holder is the first to be granted for this lock |
| H | Holder | Indicates that requested lock is granted |
| p | Priority | Enqueue holder at the head of the queue |
| t | Try | A "try" lock |
| T | Try 1CB | A "try" lock that sends a callback |
| W | Wait | Set while waiting for request to complete |
The most important holder flags are H (holder) and W (wait) as mentioned earlier, since they are set on granted lock requests and queued lock requests respectively. The ordering of the holders in the list is important. If there are any granted holders, they will always be at the head of the queue, followed by any queued holders.
If there are no granted holders, then the first holder in the list will be the one that triggers the next state change. Since demote requests are always considered higher priority than requests from the file system, that might not always directly result in a change to the state requested.
The glock subsystem supports two kinds of "try" lock. These are useful both because they allow the taking of locks out of the normal order (with suitable back-off and retry) and because they can be used to help avoid resources in use by other nodes. The normal t (try) lock is just what its name indicates; it is a "try" lock that does not do anything special. The T (
try 1CB) lock, on the other hand, is identical to the t lock except that the DLM will send a single callback to current incompatible lock holders. One use of the T (try 1CB) lock is with the iopen locks, which are used to arbitrate among the nodes when an inode's i_nlink count is zero, and determine which of the nodes will be responsible for deallocating the inode. The iopen glock is normally held in the shared state, but when the i_nlink count becomes zero and ->delete_inode() is called, it will request an exclusive lock with T (try 1CB) set. It will continue to deallocate the inode if the lock is granted. If the lock is not granted it will result in the node(s) which were preventing the grant of the lock marking their glock(s) with the D (demote) flag, which is checked at ->drop_inode() time in order to ensure that the deallocation is not forgotten.
This means that inodes that have zero link count but are still open will be deallocated by the node on which the final
close() occurs. Also, at the same time as the inode's link count is decremented to zero the inode is marked as being in the special state of having zero link count but still in use in the resource group bitmap. This functions like the ext3 file system3's orphan list in that it allows any subsequent reader of the bitmap to know that there is potentially space that might be reclaimed, and to attempt to reclaim it.
