linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/4] AFS: Add a function to excise a rejected write from the pagecache

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Date:	Fri, 25 May 2007 00:18:45 +0100
From:	David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>
To:	Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@....uio.no>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/4] AFS: Add a function to excise a rejected write from the pagecache

Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@....uio.no> wrote:

> No. If the write fails, then NFS will mark the mapping as invalid and
> attempt to call invalidate_inode_pages2() at the earliest possible
> moment.

Will it erase *all* unwritten writes?  Or is that what launder_page() is for?

How do you deal with pages that were in the process of being written out when
that particular write was rejected?  Do you just summarily clear PG_writeback
and hope no-one else looks at the page until invalidate_inode_pages2() gets
around to excising it?  Or do you have a better way?

> I'm adding in a patch to defer marking the page as uptodate until the
> write is successful in cases where NFS is writing a pristine page.

That sounds reasonable, though it doesn't help in the case I'm looking at.  Do
you also munge i_size if the write fails?

> As for pages that are already marked as uptodate, well you already have
> a race: you have deferred the page write, and so other processes may
> already have read the rejected data before you tried to write it out.

Yeah, I know, and that's very difficult to deal with without some formal
transaction rollback mechanism.  I think that the best I can do is to discard
the dodgy data that I've got lurking in the pagecache, but I still have to
deal with writes made by other users to that file after the rejected write.

There isn't a perfect way of dealing with it, given the circumstances.

David
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