linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/2]: Fix BUG in cancel_dirty

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Date:	Thu, 25 Jan 2007 09:46:54 +1100
From:	David Chinner <dgc@....com>
To:	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
Cc:	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	David Chinner <dgc@....com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	xfs@....sgi.com, akpm@...l.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2]: Fix BUG in cancel_dirty_pages on XFS

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 12:43:23AM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 09:37 +1100, David Chinner wrote:
> >
> >>With the recent changes to cancel_dirty_pages(), XFS will
> >>dump warnings in the syslog because it can truncate_inode_pages()
> >>on dirty mapped pages.
> >>
> >>I've determined that this is indeed correct behaviour for XFS
> >>as this can happen in the case of races on mmap()d files with
> >>direct I/O. In this case when we do a direct I/O read, we
> >>flush the dirty pages to disk, then truncate them out of the
> >>page cache. Unfortunately, between the flush and the truncate
> >>the mmap could dirty the page again. At this point we toss a
> >>dirty page that is mapped.
> >
> >
> >This sounds iffy, why not just leave the page in the pagecache if its
> >mapped anyway?
> 
> And why not just leave it in the pagecache and be done with it?

because what is in cache is then not coherent with what is on disk,
and a direct read is supposed to read the data that is present
in the file at the time it is issued. 

> All you need is to do a writeout before a direct IO read, which is
> what generic dio code does.

No, that's not good enough - after writeout but before the
direct I/O read is issued a process can fault the page and dirty
it. If you do a direct read, followed by a buffered read you should
get the same data. The only way to guarantee this is to chuck out
any cached pages across the range of the direct I/O so they are
fetched again from disk on the next buffered I/O. i.e. coherent
at the time the direct I/O is issued.

> I guess you'll say that direct writes still need to remove pages,

Yup.

> but in that case you'll either have to live with some racyness
> (which is what the generic code does), or have a higher level
> synchronisation to prevent buffered + direct IO writes I suppose?

The XFS inode iolock - direct I/O writes take it shared, buffered
writes takes it exclusive - so you can't do both at once. Buffered
reads take is shared, which is another reason why we need to purge
the cache on direct I/O writes - they can operate concurrently
(and coherently) with buffered reads.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
Principal Engineer
SGI Australian Software Group
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