linux-ext4 - Re: [bugzilla:219548] the kernel crashes when storing an EXT4 file system in a ZRAM device

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Message-ID: <20241212140437.GD1265540@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:04:37 -0500
From: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>
To: Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@...omium.org>,
        Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>, caiqingfu <baicaiaichibaicai@...il.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-block@...r.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [bugzilla:219548] the kernel crashes when storing an EXT4 file
 system in a ZRAM device

On Wed, Dec 11, 2024 at 11:35:40PM -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 12:37:39AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > More generally, any file system which uses the buffer cache, and
> > doesn't use jbd2 to control when writeback happens, I think is going
> > to be at risk with a block device which requires stable writes.  The
> > only way to fix this, really, is to have the buffer cache code copy
> > the data to a bounce buffer, and then issue the write from the bounce
> > buffer.
> 
> Should there be a pr_warn_once when using a file systems using the legacy
> buffer cache interfaces on a device that requires stable pages?

Well, either that, or we need to teach the buffer cache writeback code
to issue writes through a bounce buffer if the device requires stable
writes.

I'll note that this could also manifest if some program was writing to
a device that requires stable writes using buffered I/O.  For example,
if they are using postgres, which won't be switching to direct I/O for
another 2-5 years (depending on how optimistic you are and how willing
enterprise customers will be to move to the latest version of
Postgres; some are stillu using very ancient Postgres for the same
reason that RHEL 7 systems based on the 3.10 kernel are still in
production use even today.)

For this particular use case, which is running VM's on
Chromium/ChromeOS, I suspect we do need to have some kind of solution
other than triggering a WARN_ON.  Besides, I'd really rather not get
the kind of syzbot noise we would have by having some scheme that
would be trivially easy for syzbot to trigger.  (We're not should use
WARN_ON for things that can be triggered by Stupid User Tricks,
because syzbot fuzzers can be so ingenious.  :-)

	       	       	      	 	     - Ted