Re: 2.6.19 file content corruption on ext3

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:22:42 +1100
> Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

>>Yes I could believe it the corruption is caused by something else
>>completely.
>
>
> Think so.  We do have a problem here, but only on threaded apps, I believe.
> rtorrent doesn't appear to be threaded, and the bug is hit on non-preempt
> UP.

I think (see below) that it does not apply only to threaded apps. But
it would need one of SMP or PREEMPT to trigger.


> > After try_to_free_buffers detaches the buffers from the page, a
> > pagefault can come in, and mark the pte writeable, then set_page_dirty
> > (which finds no buffers, so only sets PG_dirty).
> >
> > The page can now get dirtied through this mapping.
> >
> > try_to_free_buffers then goes on to clean the page and ptes.
>
>
> try_to_free_buffers() isn't called against a page which doesn't have
> buffers.  It'll oops.

Sure. But I think the race exists... I'll try spelling it out in
the conventional way:

try_to_free_buffers()
  drop_buffers() (succeeds)

** preempt here or run right-hand thread on 2nd CPU in SMP **

                               do_no_page()
                                 set_page_dirty()

                               [now modify the page via this mapping
                               (from this process or a concurrent thread)]


  clear_page_dirty() (clears PG_dirty + pte dirty, oops)


--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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