Re: Yet another borken page_count() check ininvalidate_inode_pages2()....

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Wed Nov 15 2006 - 14:25:05 EST


On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:05:13 -0500
Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 08:46 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> > but nobody could have started another writeback after the "..." because they
> > couldn't have got the lock_page(), and lock_page() is required for
> > ->writepage()?
>
> Nothing can have called writepage(), but something may be calling
> ->writepages(). That may call set_page_writeback without taking the page
> lock.
>

The protocol is

lock_page()
set_page_writeback()
->writepage()

and there are various places which assume that nobody will start new
writeout of a locked page. But I forget where they are - things have always
been this way.

If NFS is running set_page_writeback() against an unlocked page then I
don't know what will break. I didn't know it was doing that.

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