linux-kernel - Re: Two questions on VFS/mm

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Message-ID: <20080612081847.GA12367@duck.suse.cz>
Date:	Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:18:47 +0200
From:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
To:	Neil Brown <neilb@...e.de>
Cc:	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Two questions on VFS/mm

On Thu 12-06-08 17:06:26, Neil Brown wrote:
> On Wednesday June 4, jack@...e.cz wrote:
> >   Hi,
> > 
> >   could some kind soul knowledgable in VFS/mm help me with the following
> > two questions? I've spotted them when testing some ext4 for patches...
> >   1) In write_cache_pages() we do:
> > ...
> > 	lock_page(page);
> > 	...
> > 	if (!wbc->range_cyclic && page->index > end) {
> >                    done = 1;
> >                    unlock_page(page);
> >                    continue;
> >         }
> > 	...
> > 	ret = (*writepage)(page, wbc, data);
> > 
> >   Now the problem is that if range_cyclic is set, it can happen that the
> > page we give to the filesystem is beyond the current end of file (and can
> > be already processed by invalidatepage()). Is the filesystem supposed to
> > handle this (what would it be good for to give such a page to the fs?) or
> > is it just a bug in write_cache_pages()?
> 
> Maybe there is an invariant that an address_space never has a dirty
> page beyond the end-of-file??
> Certainly 'truncate' invalidates and un-dirties such pages.
> 
> With typical writes, ->write_begin will extend EOF to include the
> page, and ->write_end will mark it dirty (I think).
> 
> mmap writes are probably a bit different, but I suspect the same
> principle applies.
> 
> If the page is not dirty, then 
> 			if (PageWriteback(page) ||
> 			    !clear_page_dirty_for_io(page)) {
> 				unlock_page(page);
> 				continue;
> 			}
> 
> will fire, and you never get to
> 			ret = (*writepage)(page, wbc, data);
  As Miklos pointed out, there's at least call do_invalidatepage() from
block_write_full_page() which does invalidate the page but does not clear
dirty bits or remove page from page cache. Otherwise I'd agree with
you...

> >   2) I have the following problem with page_mkwrite() when blocksize <
> > pagesize. What we want to do is to fill in a potential hole under a page
> > somebody wants to write to. But consider following scenario with a
> > filesystem with 1k blocksize:
> >   truncate("file", 1024);
> >   ptr = mmap("file");
> >   *ptr = 'a'
> >      -> page_mkwrite() is called.
> >         but "file" is only 1k large and we cannot really allocate blocks
> >         beyond end of file. So we allocate just one 1k block.
> >   truncate("file", 4096);
> >   *(ptr + 2048) = 'a'
> >      - nothing is called and later during writepage() time we are surprised
> >        we have a dirty page which is not backed by a filesystem block.
> > 
> >   How to solve this? One idea I have here is that when we handle truncate(),
> > we mark the original last page (if it is partial) as read-only again so
> > that page_mkwrite() is called on the next write to it. Is something like
> > this possible? Pointers to code doing something similar are welcome, I don't
> > really know these things ;).
> 
> My understanding is that memory mapping is always done in multiples of
> the page size.  When you dirty any part of a page, you effectively dirty
> the whole page, so you need to extend the file to cover the whole page.
> i.e. the page_mkwrite() call must extend the file to a size of 4096.
  Well, you definitely cannot increase file size because someone wrote to
the last page of file whose size is not multiple of page size. So when your
block size is smaller than page size, you have to handle it somehow... You
could instantiate blocks beyond end of file but that gets a bit tricky
(e.g. in ext3, we don't allow such blocks to exist so far).

							Thanks for ideas
									Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR
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