linux-kernel - Re: [patch 9/9] mm: fix pagecache write deadlocks

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Message-ID: <20070206020916.GA31476@wotan.suse.de>
Date:	Tue, 6 Feb 2007 03:09:16 +0100
From:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>
To:	Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@....ac.uk>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux Filesystems <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux Memory Management <linux-mm@...ck.org>
Subject: Re: [patch 9/9] mm: fix pagecache write deadlocks

On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 05:40:35PM +0000, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Feb 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > truncate's OK: we're holding i_mutex.
> 
> How about excluding readpage() (in addition to truncate if Nick is right  
> and some cases of truncate do not hold i_mutex) with an extra page flag as
> I proposed for truncate exclusion?  Then it would not matter that
> prepare_write might have allocated blocks and might expose stale data.    
> It would go to sleep and wait on the bit to be cleared instead of trying  
> to bring the page uptodate.  It can then lock the page and either find it 
> uptodate (because commit_write did it) or not and then bring it uptodate.
> 
> Then we could safely fault in the page, copy from it into a temporary 
> page, then lock the destination page again and copy into it.
> 
> This is getting more involved as a patch again...  )-:  But at least it   
> does not affect the common case except for having to check the new page 
> flag in every readpage() and truncate() call.  But at least the checks 
> could be with an "if (unlikely(newpageflag()))" so should not be too bad.
> 
> Have I missed anything this time?

Yes. If you have a flag to exclude readpage(), then you must also
exclude filemap_nopage, in which case it is still deadlocky.

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