Date:	Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:45:02 -0400
From:	Josef Bacik <jbacik@...hat.com>
To:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
Cc:	Josef Bacik <jbacik@...hat.com>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] fix panic in jbd by adding locks

On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 06:48:15PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Tue 21-08-07 11:43:12, Josef Bacik wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 05:20:21PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> > >   OK, thanks. So record probably points to an already freed memory which has
> > > been overwritten by garbage...
> > > 
> > > > >   Thanks for details. I'm still not convinced. What they essentially
> > > > > write is that slab cache revoke_record_cache is not guarded by any spin
> > > > > lock. It's not and that should be fine as slab caches are SMP safe by
> > > > > themselves.
> > > > 
> > > > No its the list_del thats not gaurded, so the hash list gets screwed up outside
> > > > of a lock.  If there are other problems that need to be addressed then ok, but I
> > > > still think that we should be protecting all of the list traversal/changing
> > > > should be protected by the lock.  Thank you,
> > >   But the traversal in journal_write_revoke_records() *is* in fact guarded
> > > by the commit logic in journal_commit_transaction() handling code - it
> > > doesn't allow anybody to mess with revoke lists when a transaction is
> > > committing. So there's no need to guard the hash list again in
> > > journal_write_revoke_records() by the spinlock. And if the logic does not
> > > work and lets somebody modify revoke lists during commit, we have more
> > > serious problems than hash list corruption. That's why I'm trying to find
> > > out where's the real culprit of the Oops. But so far I cannot find out how
> > > the corruption can happen...
> > 
> > I should note here I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just want to
> > understand.  Ok so journal_commit_transaction() will make sure all the
>   I also just want to understand how the oops can happen :).
> 
> > handle_t's are removed and such before processing the revoke lists, but right
> > before we process the revoke lists we set the journals running transaction to
> > NULL, which means we can continue on our merry way.  AFAICS the revoke lists are
> > per journal, not per transaction, so once we give up the j_state_lock after
> > having made sure the handle_t's had done their thing, we set the
> > running_transaction to NULL letting people continue to do their thing, and since
> > the revoke table is on a per journal basis, its completely valid for a new
> > transaction to be started, a handle to be added to it, journal_cancel_revoke()
> > to be run against that handle while still in journal_commit_transaction().  It
> > wouldn't necessarily be a handle_t from the transaction we are in the middle of
> > committing, it would be from a new transaction, and since the revoke list is per
> > journal, both the transaction thats currently being committed and the new
> > transaction would have access to the same revoke list, hence the race.  Is this
> > correct?  If not let me know because I want to understand this code better.
>   The trick is, there are in fact two revoke tables. So the commit code
> does the following:
>   1) It waits until all handles of the running transaction are released
> (this is the while loop waiting checking t_updates).
>   2) It does some cleanup of unused buffers.
>   3) Switches revoke tables - i.e. journal->j_revoke now points to a
> freshly initialized table, the table of the committing transaction is kept
> hidden.
>   4) Transaction state is changed to FLUSH, journal->j_running_transaction
> is set to NULL, etc.
>   5) Data writeout is performed.
>   6) Saved revoke hash table is written.
> 
>   After 3), journal_revoke() and journal_revoke_cancel() access the new
> hash table and thus have no influence on journal_write_revoke_records(). It
> could possibly be that the pointer to the old hash table would be stored in
> some local variable - but all the places where we store a pointer to the
> hash table seem to be contained inside journal_start(), journal_stop()
> pairs (all functions working with hash tables take a transaction handle
> as an argument) and because all handles were released at some point in time,
> we know that this should not happen either.
>   I hope it is clearer now. If you still have any questions, please ask.
> 

Ahh the switch is what I was overlooking, thank you that makes more sense.
Course now I have to figure out what really is going on here :(.  I'll see if I
can't sort this out.  Thanks much for your help,

Josef
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