Re: [PATCH 1/9] ext4: Fix races between page faults and hole punching

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 10:15:53AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> Currently, page faults and hole punching are completely unsynchronized.
> This can result in page fault faulting in a page into a range that we
> are punching after truncate_pagecache_range() has been called and thus
> we can end up with a page mapped to disk blocks that will be shortly
> freed. Filesystem corruption will shortly follow. Note that the same
> race is avoided for truncate by checking page fault offset against
> i_size but there isn't similar mechanism available for punching holes.
> 
> Fix the problem by creating new rw semaphore i_mmap_sem in inode and
> grab it for writing over truncate, hole punching, and other functions
> removing blocks from extent tree and for read over page faults. We
> cannot easily use i_data_sem for this since that ranks below transaction
> start and we need something ranking above it so that it can be held over
> the whole truncate / hole punching operation. Also remove various
> workarounds we had in the code to reduce race window when page fault
> could have created pages with stale mapping information.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>

This patch is causing ext4/001 to fail even using the standard 4k
non-DAX test configuration.  You had mentioned that extent zeroing was
getting suppressed for DAX file systems, but it looks like it's
getting suppressed even in the non-DAX configuration:

% kvm-xfstests -c 4k ext4/001
...
ext4/001		[21:11:29][    7.796142] run fstests ext4/001 at 2015-10-23 21:11:29
 [21:11:32] - output mismatch (see /results/results-4k/ext4/001.out.bad)
    --- tests/ext4/001.out	2015-10-18 23:46:49.000000000 -0400
    +++ /results/results-4k/ext4/001.out.bad	2015-10-23 21:11:32.104276540 -0400
    @@ -131,14 +131,10 @@
     2: [32..39]: hole
     daa100df6e6711906b61c9ab5aa16032
     	11. data -> hole -> data
    -0: [0..7]: data
    -1: [8..31]: unwritten
    -2: [32..39]: data
    +0: [0..39]: data
    ...
    (Run 'diff -u tests/ext4/001.out /results/results-4k/ext4/001.out.bad'  to see the entire diff)


      	  		     					       - Ted