Re: Another proposal for DAX fault locking

[Ross Zwisler]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 09:09:53AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 11:32:49AM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> > On Tue 09-02-16 10:18:53, Dan Williams wrote:
> > > On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 9:24 AM, Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > Hello,
> > > >
> > > > I was thinking about current issues with DAX fault locking [1] (data
> > > > corruption due to racing faults allocating blocks) and also races which
> > > > currently don't allow us to clear dirty tags in the radix tree due to races
> > > > between faults and cache flushing [2]. Both of these exist because we don't
> > > > have an equivalent of page lock available for DAX. While we have a
> > > > reasonable solution available for problem [1], so far I'm not aware of a
> > > > decent solution for [2]. After briefly discussing the issue with Mel he had
> > > > a bright idea that we could used hashed locks to deal with [2] (and I think
> > > > we can solve [1] with them as well). So my proposal looks as follows:
> > > >
> > > > DAX will have an array of mutexes (the array can be made per device but
> > > > initially a global one should be OK). We will use mutexes in the array as a
> > > > replacement for page lock - we will use hashfn(mapping, index) to get
> > > > particular mutex protecting our offset in the mapping. On fault / page
> > > > mkwrite, we'll grab the mutex similarly to page lock and release it once we
> > > > are done updating page tables. This deals with races in [1]. When flushing
> > > > caches we grab the mutex before clearing writeable bit in page tables
> > > > and clearing dirty bit in the radix tree and drop it after we have flushed
> > > > caches for the pfn. This deals with races in [2].
> > > >
> > > > Thoughts?
> > > >
> > > 
> > > I like the fact that this makes the locking explicit and
> > > straightforward rather than something more tricky.  Can we make the
> > > hashfn pfn based?  I'm thinking we could later reuse this as part of
> > > the solution for eliminating the need to allocate struct page, and we
> > > don't have the 'mapping' available in all paths...
> > 
> > So Mel originally suggested to use pfn for hashing as well. My concern with
> > using pfn is that e.g. if you want to fill a hole, you don't have a pfn to
> > lock. What you really need to protect is a logical offset in the file to
> > serialize allocation of underlying blocks, its mapping into page tables,
> > and flushing the blocks out of caches. So using inode/mapping and offset
> > for the hashing is easier (it isn't obvious to me we can fix hole filling
> > races with pfn-based locking).
> 
> So how does that file+offset hash work when trying to lock different
> ranges?  file+offset hashing to determine the lock to use only works
> if we are dealing with fixed size ranges that the locks affect.
> e.g. offset has 4k granularity for a single page faults, but we also
> need to handle 2MB granularity for huge page faults, and IIRC 1GB
> granularity for giant page faults...
> 
> What's the plan here?

I wonder if it makes sense to tie the locking in with the radix tree?
Meaning, instead of having an array of mutexes, we lock based on the radix
tree entry.

Right now we already have to check for PTE and PMD entries in the radix tree,
and with Matthew's suggested radix tree changes a lookup of a random address
would give you the appropriate PMD or PUD entry, if one was present.

This sort of solves the need for having a hash function that works on
file+offset - that's all already there when using the radix tree...