linux-ext4 - notes in the WARN_ON in ext4_release

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Date:	Sat, 29 Dec 2012 11:48:30 -0500
From:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>
To:	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: notes in the WARN_ON in ext4_release_page() with data=journal

The last couple of days I've been trying to track down with a WARN_ON in
ext4_release_page() which can be reproduced by running xfstests #247 in
data=journalled mode, since Linux 3.1 (it bisects down to commit
84ebd7956134).  I'm sending the results of this investigation to
linux-ext4 partially as a note to myself, or in case other people notice
it.

What's going on is while the O_DIRECT write is happening, in
generic_file_direct_write(), first we force all of the pages in question
to disk using filemap_write_and_wait_range().  Then, we invalidate all
of the pages in question.  If there is a process which is also modifying
the page using mmap writes (as in xfstest #247), the page can get marked
dirty after its writeback, and before the pages are released by
invalidate_inode_pages2_range().

(The PageChecked flag is set by ext4_journalled_set_page_dirty(), and
cleared by __ext4_journalled_writepage() --- for an explanation why,
please see comments for __ext4_journalled_writepage().  When the page
gets released, if ext4_release_page() notices that the PageChecked flag
is still set, it will trigger the WARN_ON.)

This WARN_ON(), then since the stack trace involves
invalidate_page_range(), is harmless.  If the user is doing unaligned
DIO writes, the changes made by the mmap might disappear, and which
means our cache coherency guarantees made by our O_DIRECT guarantee is
not absolute.  I'm not really worried about it since, if an application
is racing an mmap modification with an O_DIRECT write, it's just asking
to lose --- and this race has been there for a long time.  It's just
that the data=journal PageChecked machinery makes this noticeable ---
this potential failure of cache coherency can happen in other ext4
modes, since the race arises out of the generic DIO code.  Fixing it
would reqiure adding extra machinery, which is not worth it.

                                           - Ted
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