linux-kernel - Re: 2.6.19 file content corruption on ext3

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Message-Id: <1166519146.10372.130.camel@twins>
Date:	Tue, 19 Dec 2006 10:05:46 +0100
From:	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>
To:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...l.org>
Cc:	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...l.org>, andrei.popa@...eo.ro,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Hugh Dickins <hugh@...itas.com>,
	Florian Weimer <fw@...eb.enyo.de>,
	Marc Haber <mh+linux-kernel@...schlus.de>,
	Martin Michlmayr <tbm@...ius.com>
Subject: Re: 2.6.19 file content corruption on ext3

On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 10:00 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 00:04 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> > Nobody has actually ever explained why "test_clear_page_dirty()" is good 
> > at all.
> > 
> >  - Why is it ever used instead of "clear_page_dirty_for_io()"?
> > 
> >  - What is the difference?
> > 
> >  - Why would you EVER want to clear bits just in the "struct page *" or 
> >    just in the PTE's?
> > 
> >  - Why is it EVER correct to clear dirty bits except JUST BEFORE THE IO?
> > 
> > In other words, I have a theory:
> > 
> >  "A lot of this is actually historical cruft. Some of it may even be code 
> >   that was never supposed to work, but because we maintained _other_ dirty 
> >   bits in the PTE's, and never touched them before, we never even realized 
> >   that the code that played with PG_dirty was totally insane"
> > 
> > Now, that's just a theory. And yeah, it may be stated a bit provocatively. 
> > It may not be entirely correct. I'm just saying.. maybe it is?
> 
> On Sun, 2006-12-17 at 15:40 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > try_to_free_buffers() clears the page's dirty state if it successfully removed
> > the page's buffers.
> > 
> >   Background for this:
> > 
> >   - a process does a one-byte-write to a file on a 64k pagesize, 4k
> >     blocksize ext3 filesystem.  The page is now PageDirty, !PgeUptodate and
> >     has one dirty buffer and 15 not uptodate buffers.
> > 
> >   - kjournald writes the dirty buffer.  The page is now PageDirty,
> >     !PageUptodate and has a mix of clean and not uptodate buffers.
> > 
> >   - try_to_free_buffers() removes the page's buffers.  It MUST now clear
> >     PageDirty.  If we were to leave the page dirty then we'd have a dirty, not
> >     uptodate page with no buffer_heads.
> > 
> >     We're screwed: we cannot write the page because we don't know which
> >     sections of it contain garbage.  We cannot read the page because we don't
> >     know which sections of it contain modified data.  We cannot free the page
> >     because it is dirty.
> 
> However!! this is not true for mapped pages because mapped pages must
> have the whole (16k in akpm's example) page loaded. Hence I suspect that
> what Andrei did by accident - remove the if (mapping) case in
> test_clean_dirty_pages() - is actually totally correct.

Obviously I need my morning shot, 64k ofcourse.

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