Re: [PATCH v2] ext4: fix race condition between buffer write and page_mkwrite

Baokun Li
2024-04-15T04:28:06Z

On 2023/6/5 23:08, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Mon 05-06-23 15:55:35, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 05, 2023 at 02:21:41PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
>>> On Mon 05-06-23 11:16:55, Jan Kara wrote:
>>>> Yeah, I agree, that is also the conclusion I have arrived at when thinking
>>>> about this problem now. We should be able to just remove the conversion
>>>> from ext4_page_mkwrite() and rely on write(2) or truncate(2) doing it when
>>>> growing i_size.
>>> OK, thinking more about this and searching through the history, I've
>>> realized why the conversion is originally in ext4_page_mkwrite(). The
>>> problem is described in commit 7b4cc9787fe35b ("ext4: evict inline data
>>> when writing to memory map") but essentially it boils down to the fact that
>>> ext4 writeback code does not expect dirty page for a file with inline data
>>> because ext4_write_inline_data_end() should have copied the data into the
>>> inode and cleared the folio's dirty flag.
>>>
>>> Indeed messing with xattrs from the writeback path to copy page contents
>>> into inline data xattr would be ... interesting. Hum, out of good ideas for
>>> now :-|.
>> Is it so bad? Now that we don't have writepage in ext4, only
>> writepages, it seems like we have a considerably more benign locking
>> environment to work in.
> Well, yes, without ->writepage() it might be *possible*. But still rather
> ugly. The problem is that in ->writepages() i_size is not stable. Thus also
> whether the inode data is inline or not is not stable. We'd need inode_lock
> for that but that is not easily doable in the writeback path - inode lock
> would then become fs_reclaim unsafe...
>
> Honza
Hi Honza!
Hi Ted!
Hi Matthew!

Long time later came back to this, because while discussing another similar
ABBA problem with Hou Tao, he mentioned VM_FAULT_RETRY, and then I
thought that this could be used to solve this problem as well.

The general idea is that if we see a file with inline data in
ext4_page_mkwrite(),
we release the mmap_lock and grab the inode_lock to convert the inline data,
and then return VM_FAULT_RETRY to retry to get the mmap_lock.

The code implementation is as follows, do you have any thoughts?

diff --git a/fs/ext4/inode.c b/fs/ext4/inode.c
index 537803250ca9..e044c11c9cf6 100644
--- a/fs/ext4/inode.c
+++ b/fs/ext4/inode.c
@@ -6056,15 +6056,36 @@ vm_fault_t ext4_page_mkwrite(struct vm_fault *vmf)
if (unlikely(IS_IMMUTABLE(inode)))
return VM_FAULT_SIGBUS;

+    /*
+     * The ext4 writeback code does not expect dirty page for a file with
+     * inline data, so inline data needs to be converted. But it needs to
+     * hold the inode_lock when converting, and trying to lock the inode
+     * while holding the mmap_lock may result in an ABBA deadlock. So here
+     * we release the mmap_lock for conversion and retry after conversion.
+     * Only one retry is allowed to avoid endless loops.
+     * Acquire xattr_sem to avoid race with inline data conversion.
+     */
+    down_read(&EXT4_I(inode)->xattr_sem);
+    if (ext4_has_inline_data(inode)) {
+        up_read(&EXT4_I(inode)->xattr_sem);
+
+        if (!fault_flag_allow_retry_first(vmf->flags))
+            return VM_FAULT_SIGBUS;
+
+        release_fault_lock(vmf);
+
+        inode_lock(inode);
+        ext4_convert_inline_data(inode);
+        inode_unlock(inode);
+        return VM_FAULT_RETRY;
+    }
+    up_read(&EXT4_I(inode)->xattr_sem);
+
sb_start_pagefault(inode->i_sb);
file_update_time(vma->vm_file);

filemap_invalidate_lock_shared(mapping);

-    err = ext4_convert_inline_data(inode);
-    if (err)
-        goto out_ret;
-
/*
* On data journalling we skip straight to the transaction handle:
* there's no delalloc; page truncated will be checked later; the

--
With Best Regards,
Baokun Li
.