Re: 2.6.18 ext3 panic.

From: Eric Sandeen
Date: Thu Oct 12 2006 - 09:21:22 EST


Jan Kara wrote:

Talking with Stephen, it seemed like the page lock should synchronize these threads, but I've found that we can get to journal_dirty_data acting on the buffer heads w/o having the page locked...
Yes, PageLock should protect us. Where can we call
journal_dirty_data() without PageLock? I see the following callers:
ext3_ordered_commit_write - should have PageLock
ext3_ordered_writepage - has PageLock
ext3_block_truncate_page - has PageLock

And that are all callers from ext3. Am I missing something?

Honza

I put an assert about the page being locked in journal_dirty_data, and hit it right away. I'll look a bit more but I think this is how I got there:


ext3_ordered_writepage <-- assert PageLocked
...
block_write_full_page
__block_write_full_page
unlock_page()
...
walk_page_buffers
journal_dirty_data_fn
ext3_journal_dirty_data
journal_dirty_data <-- find page unlocked

there's a comment in ext3_ordered_writepage:

/*
* The page can become unlocked at any point now, and
* truncate can then come in and change things. So we
* can't touch *page from now on. But *page_bufs is
* safe due to elevated refcount.
*/

-Eric
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