Re: [BUG] Slab corruption during XFS writeback under memory pressure

From: Calvin Owens
Date: Mon Jul 18 2016 - 22:06:13 EST


On 07/17/2016 11:02 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 10:00:03AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 05:18:02PM -0700, Calvin Owens wrote:
Hello all,

I've found a nasty source of slab corruption. Based on seeing similar symptoms
on boxes at Facebook, I suspect it's been around since at least 3.10.

It only reproduces under memory pressure so far as I can tell: the issue seems
to be that XFS reclaims pages from buffers that are still in use by
scsi/block. I'm not sure which side the bug lies on, but I've only observed it
with XFS.
[....]
But this indicates that the page is under writeback at this point,
so that tends to indicate that the above freeing was incorrect.

Hmmm - it's clear we've got direct reclaim involved here, and the
suspicion of a dirty page that has had it's bufferheads cleared.
Are there any other warnings in the log from XFS prior to kasan
throwing the error?

Can you try the patch below?

Thanks for getting this out so quickly :)

So far so good: I booted Linus' tree as of this morning and reproduced the ASAN
splat. After applying your patch I haven't triggered it.

I'm a bit wary since it was hard to trigger reliably in the first place... so I
lined up a few dozen boxes to run the test case overnight. I'll confirm in the
morning (-0700) they look good.

Thanks,
Calvin

-Dave.