Date:	Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:53:25 +0200
From:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
To:	Jiaying Zhang <jiayingz@...gle.com>
Cc:	Michael Tokarev <mjt@....msk.ru>, Tao Ma <tm@....ma>,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, sandeen@...hat.com,
	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
Subject: Re: DIO process stuck apparently due to dioread_nolock (3.0)

On Mon 15-08-11 16:53:34, Jiaying Zhang wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 1:56 AM, Michael Tokarev <mjt@....msk.ru> wrote:
> > 15.08.2011 12:00, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> > [....]
> >
> > So, it looks like this (starting with cold cache):
> >
> > 1. rename the redologs and copy them over - this will
> >   make a hot copy of redologs
> > 2. startup oracle - it will complain that the redologs aren't
> >   redologs, the header is corrupt
> > 3. shut down oracle, start it up again - it will succeed.
> >
> > If between 1 and 2 you'll issue sync(1) everything will work.
> > When shutting down, oracle calls fsync(), so that's like
> > sync(1) again.
> >
> > If there will be some time between 1. and 2., everything
> > will work too.
> >
> > Without dioread_nolock I can't trigger the problem no matter
> > how I tried.
> >
> >
> > A smaller test case.  I used redo1.odf file (one of the
> > redologs) as a test file, any will work.
> >
> >  $ cp -p redo1.odf temp
> >  $ dd if=temp of=foo iflag=direct count=20
> Isn't this the expected behavior here? When doing
> 'cp -p redo1.odf temp', data is copied to temp through
> buffer write, but there is no guarantee when data will be
> actually written to disk. Then with 'dd if=temp of=foo
> iflag=direct count=20', data is read directly from disk.
> Very likely, the written data hasn't been flushed to disk
> yet so ext4 returns zero in this case.
  No it's not. Buffered and direct IO is supposed to work correctly
(although not fast) together. In this particular case we take care to flush
dirty data from page cache before performing direct IO read... But
something is broken in this path obviously.

I don't have time to dig into this in detail now but what seems to be the
problem is that with dioread_nolock option, we don't acquire i_mutex for
direct IO reads anymore. Thus these reads can compete with
ext4_end_io_nolock() called from ext4_end_io_work() (this is called under
i_mutex so without dioread_nolock the race cannot happen).

Hmm, the new writepages code seems to be broken in combination with direct
IO. Direct IO code expects that when filemap_write_and_wait() finishes,
data is on disk but with new bio submission code this is not true because
we clear PageWriteback bit (which is what filemap_fdatawait() waits for) in
ext4_end_io_buffer_write() but do extent conversion only after that in
convert workqueue. So the race seems to be there all the time, just without
dioread_nolock it's much smaller.

Fixing this is going to be non-trivial - I'm not sure we can really move
clearing of PageWriteback bit to conversion workqueue. I think we already
tried that once but it caused deadlocks for some reason...

> > Now, first 512bytes of "foo" will contain all zeros, while
> > the beginning of redo1.odf is _not_ zeros.
> >
> > Again, without aioread_nolock it works as expected.
> >
> >
> > And the most important note: without the patch there's no
> > data corruption like that.  But instead, there is the
> > lockup... ;)

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR
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