linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH v2] ext4: fix race condition between buffer write and page

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Date:   Tue, 6 Jun 2023 20:19:29 +0800
From:   Baokun Li <libaokun1@...wei.com>
To:     Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
CC:     Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>, <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>,
        <adilger.kernel@...ger.ca>, <ritesh.list@...il.com>,
        <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, <jun.nie@...aro.org>,
        <ebiggers@...nel.org>, <yi.zhang@...wei.com>,
        <yangerkun@...wei.com>, <yukuai3@...wei.com>,
        <syzbot+a158d886ca08a3fecca4@...kaller.appspotmail.com>,
        <stable@...r.kernel.org>, Baokun Li <libaokun1@...wei.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] ext4: fix race condition between buffer write and
 page_mkwrite

On 2023/6/5 23:08, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Mon 05-06-23 15:55:35, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 05, 2023 at 02:21:41PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
>>> On Mon 05-06-23 11:16:55, Jan Kara wrote:
>>>> Yeah, I agree, that is also the conclusion I have arrived at when thinking
>>>> about this problem now. We should be able to just remove the conversion
>>>> from ext4_page_mkwrite() and rely on write(2) or truncate(2) doing it when
>>>> growing i_size.
>>> OK, thinking more about this and searching through the history, I've
>>> realized why the conversion is originally in ext4_page_mkwrite(). The
>>> problem is described in commit 7b4cc9787fe35b ("ext4: evict inline data
>>> when writing to memory map") but essentially it boils down to the fact that
>>> ext4 writeback code does not expect dirty page for a file with inline data
>>> because ext4_write_inline_data_end() should have copied the data into the
>>> inode and cleared the folio's dirty flag.
>>>
>>> Indeed messing with xattrs from the writeback path to copy page contents
>>> into inline data xattr would be ... interesting. Hum, out of good ideas for
>>> now :-|.
>> Is it so bad?  Now that we don't have writepage in ext4, only
>> writepages, it seems like we have a considerably more benign locking
>> environment to work in.
> Well, yes, without ->writepage() it might be *possible*. But still rather
> ugly. The problem is that in ->writepages() i_size is not stable. Thus also
> whether the inode data is inline or not is not stable. We'd need inode_lock
> for that but that is not easily doable in the writeback path - inode lock
> would then become fs_reclaim unsafe...
>
> 								Honza

If we try to add inode_lock to ext4_writepages to complete the
conversion, there may be a deadlock as follows:

       CPU0             CPU1
writeback_single_inode
  spin_lock(&inode->i_lock) ---> LOCK B
                    enable_verity
                     inode_lock(inode)  ---> LOCK A
                     vops->begin_enable_verity
                     ext4_begin_enable_verity
                      ext4_inode_attach_jinode
                       spin_lock(&inode->i_lock)   ---> try LOCK B
  __writeback_single_inode          |
   do_writepages                ABBA deadlock
    ext4_writepages                 |
     inode_lock(inode)  ---> try LOCK A

If we add inode_lock to the write back process to complete the inline 
conversion,
it seems that we still have to add an ops ...

I've been going over this problem for a long time, but I can't think of 
a good way
to solve it.

-- 
With Best Regards,
Baokun Li
.