zfsonlinux/zfs — pull request #2323 by dweeezil (2014-05-11 13:39:43+00:00)
Title: Allow for lock-free reading zfsdev_state_list.

Restructure the zfsdev_state_list to allow for lock-free reading by
converting to a simple singly-linked list from which items are never
deleted and over which only forward iterations are performed. It depends
on, among other things, the atomicity of accessing the zs_minor integer
and zs_next pointer.

This fixes a lock inversion in which the zfsdev_state_lock is used by
both the sync task (txg_sync) and indirectly by any user program which
uses /dev/zfs; the zfsdev_release method uses the same lock and then
blocks on the sync task.

The most typical failure scenerio occurs when the sync task is cleaning
up a user hold while various concurrent "zfs" commands are in progress.

Neither Illumos nor Solaris are affected by this issue because they use
DDI interface which provides lock-free reading of device state via the
ddi_get_soft_state() function.