Re: [PATCH] mm: fix page_mkclean_one (was: 2.6.19 file contentcorruption on ext3)

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Sun Dec 24 2006 - 12:17:11 EST




On Sun, 24 Dec 2006, Andrei Popa wrote:

> On Sun, 2006-12-24 at 04:31 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > Andrei Popa <andrei.popa@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > /dev/sda7 on / type ext3 (rw,noatime,nobh)
> > >
> > > I don't have corruption. I tested twice.
> >
> > This is a surprising result. Can you pleas retest ext3 data=writeback,nobh?
>
> Yes, no corruption. Also tested only with data=writeback and had no
> corruption.

Ok, so it would seem to be writeback related _somehow_. However, most of
the differences (I _thought_) in ext3 actually show up only if you have
*both* "nobh" and "data=writeback", and as far as I can tell, just a
simple "data=writeback" should still use the bog-standard
"block_write_full_page()".

Andrew?

Although as far as I can see, then ext2 should work as-is too (since it
too also just uses "block_write_full_page()" without anything fancy).

Strange.

How about this particularly stupid diff? (please test with something that
_would_ cause corruption normally).

It is _entirely_ untested, but what it tries to do is to simply serialize
any writeback in progress with any process that tries to re-map a shared
page into its address space and dirty it. I haven't tested it, and maybe
it misses some case, but it looks likea good way to try to avoid races
with marking pages dirty and the writeback phase ..

Linus
---
diff --git a/mm/memory.c b/mm/memory.c
index 563792f..64ed10b 100644
--- a/mm/memory.c
+++ b/mm/memory.c
@@ -1544,6 +1544,7 @@ static int do_wp_page(struct mm_struct *mm, struct vm_area_struct *vma,
if (!pte_same(*page_table, orig_pte))
goto unlock;
}
+ wait_on_page_writeback(old_page);
dirty_page = old_page;
get_page(dirty_page);
reuse = 1;
@@ -2215,6 +2216,7 @@ retry:
page_cache_release(new_page);
return VM_FAULT_SIGBUS;
}
+ wait_on_page_writeback(new_page);
}
}

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