Re: [Bug 199931] New: systemd/rtorrent file data corruption when using echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Liu Bo
2018-06-06T13:55:18Z

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 9:44 PM, Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> wrote:
> On 6 Jun 2018, at 9:38, Liu Bo wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 8:18 AM, Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 5 Jun 2018, at 16:03, Andrew Morton wrote:
>>>
>>>> (switched to email. Please respond via emailed reply-to-all, not via
>>>> the
>>>> bugzilla web interface).
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, 05 Jun 2018 18:01:36 +0000 bugzilla-daemon@bugzilla.kernel.org
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199931
>>>>>
>>>>> Bug ID: 199931
>>>>> Summary: systemd/rtorrent file data corruption when using
>>>>> echo
>>>>> 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> A long tale of woe here. Chris, do you think the pagecache corruption
>>>> is a general thing, or is it possible that btrfs is contributing?
>>>>
>>>> Also, that 4.4 oom-killer regression sounds very serious.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> This week I found a bug in btrfs file write with how we handle stable
>>> pages.
>>> Basically it works like this:
>>>
>>> write(fd, some bytes less than a page)
>>> write(fd, some bytes into the same page)
>>> btrfs prefaults the userland page
>>> lock_and_cleanup_extent_if_need() <- stable pages
>>> wait for writeback()
>>> clear_page_dirty_for_io()
>>>
>>> At this point we have a page that was dirty and is now clean. That's
>>> normally fine, unless our prefaulted page isn't in ram anymore.
>>>
>>> iov_iter_copy_from_user_atomic() <--- uh oh
>>>
>>> If the copy_from_user fails, we drop all our locks and retry. But along
>>> the
>>> way, we completely lost the dirty bit on the page. If the page is
>>> dropped
>>> by drop_caches, the writes are lost. We'll just read back the stale
>>> contents of that page during the retry loop. This won't result in crc
>>> errors because the bytes we lost were never crc'd.
>>>
>>
>> So we're going to carefully redirty the page under the page lock, right?
>
>
> I don't think we actually need to clean it. We have the page locked,
> writeback won't start until we unlock.
>

My concern is that the buggy thing is similar to compression path,
where we also did the trick of clear_page_dirty_for_io and
redirty_pages to avoid any faults wandering in and changing pages
underneath, but seems here we're fine if pages get changed in between.

>>
>>> It could result in zeros in the file because we're basically reading a
>>> hole,
>>> and those zeros could move around in the page depending on which part of
>>> the
>>> page was dirty when the writes were lost.
>>>
>>
>> I got a question, while re-reading this page, wouldn't it read
>> old/stale on-disk data?
>
>
> If it was never written we should be treating it like a hole, but I'll
> double check.
>

Okay, I think this would also happen in the overwrite case, where
stale data lies on disk.

thanks,
liubo