Re: [PATCH 2/2] dax: fix bdev NULL pointer dereferences

[Jared Hulbert]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 10:01 PM, Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 9:28 PM, Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 11:28:15AM -0700, Ross Zwisler wrote:
>>> I guess I need to go off and understand if we can have DAX mappings on such a
>>> device.  If we can, we may have a problem - we can get the block_device from
>>> get_block() in I/O path and the various fault paths, but we don't have access
>>> to get_block() when flushing via dax_writeback_mapping_range().  We avoid
>>> needing it the normal case by storing the sector results from get_block() in
>>> the radix tree.
>>
>> I think we're doing it wrong by storing the sector in the radix tree; we'd
>> really need to store both the sector and the bdev which is too much data.
>>
>> If we store the PFN of the underlying page instead, we don't have this
>> problem.  Instead, we have a different problem; of the device going
>> away under us.  I'm trying to find the code which tears down PTEs when
>> the device goes away, and I'm not seeing it.  What do we do about user
>> mappings of the device?
>>
>
> I deferred the dax tear down code until next cycle as Al rightly
> pointed out some needed re-works:
>
> https://lists.01.org/pipermail/linux-nvdimm/2016-January/003995.html

If you store sectors in the radix and the device gets removed you
still have to unmap user mappings of PFNs.

So why is the device remove harder with the PFN vs bdev+sector radix
entry?  Either way you need a list of PFNs and their corresponding
PTE's, right?

And are we just talking graceful removal?  Any plans for device failures?