linux-ext4 - Re: REGRESSION: [PATCH 04/12] ext4: Disable merging of uninitialized extents

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Date:	Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:58:32 +0100
From:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
To:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>
Cc:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, Dmitry Monakhov <dmonakhov@...nvz.org>,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: REGRESSION: [PATCH 04/12] ext4: Disable merging of
 uninitialized extents

On Sat 09-02-13 12:10:15, Ted Tso wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 01:00:38PM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> > Merging of uninitialized extents creates all sorts of interesting race
> > possibilities when writeback / DIO races with fallocate. Thus
> > ext4_convert_unwritten_extents_endio() has to deal with a case where
> > extent to be converted needs to be split out first. That isn't nice
> > for two reasons:
> > 
> > 1) It may need allocation of extent tree block so ENOSPC is possible.
> > 2) It complicates end_io handling code
> > 
> > So we disable merging of uninitialized extents which allows us to simplify
> > the code. Extents will get merged after they are converted to initialized
> > ones.
> > 
> > Reviewed-by: Zheng Liu <wenqing.lz@...bao.com>
> > Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
> 
> Sorry for not noticing this earlier, but this patch is causing a
> regression.  It is loading to test 113 failing when dioread_nolock is
> used:
> 
> 113	[   47.619363] EXT4-fs error (device vdb): ext4_convert_unwritten_extents_endio:3411: i
> node #10951: comm kworker/u:0: Written extent modified before IO finished: extent logical block
>  1024, len 1024; IO logical block 1024, len 127
> [   47.619363] 
> [   47.623239] EXT4-fs warning (device vdb): ext4_convert_unwritten_extents:4522: inode #10951:
>  block 1024: len 127: ext4_ext_map_blocks returned -5
> [   47.628975] EXT4-fs (vdb): failed to convert unwritten extents to written extents -- potenti
> al data loss!  (inode 10951, offset 4194304, size 520192, error -5)
  Hum, yes. Thanks for letting us know. I was able to reproduce this and
I'm looking into it now. I guess it is a similar problem as Dmitry fixed in
his fix...

> As a result, I am considering whether or not I should to drop the
> following patches from the ext4 tree:
> 
> e63dd9c ext4: disable merging of uninitialized extents
> de39534 ext4: remove unnecessary wait for extent conversion in ext4_fallocate()
> 37bf0a8 ext4: ext4_split_extent should take care of extent zeroout
> 
> I know that these patches fix other potential races which causes data
> loss, but they've been around for a while, and in practice seem to be
> relatively rarely hit.
  The third patch is a fix which shouldn't cause any issues. So you can
take just that one and leave the other two aside until we are able to
resolve the issue.

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