Re: [f2fs-dev] Potential data corruption?

[Hongwei Qin <glqinhongwei@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Sun, Dec 8, 2019 at 12:01 PM Chao Yu <chao@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> On 2019-12-7 18:10, 红烧的威化饼 wrote:
> > Hi F2FS experts,
> > The following confuses me:
> >
> > A typical fsync() goes like this:
> > 1) Issue data block IOs
> > 2) Wait for completion
> > 3) Issue chained node block IOs
> > 4) Wait for completion
> > 5) Issue flush command
> >
> > In order to preserve data consistency under sudden power failure, it requires that the storage device persists data blocks prior to node blocks.
> > Otherwise, under sudden power failure, it's possible that the persisted node block points to NULL data blocks.
>
> Firstly it doesn't break POSIX semantics, right? since fsync() didn't return
> successfully before sudden power-cut, so we can not guarantee that data is fully
> persisted in such condition.
>
> However, what you want looks like atomic write semantics, which mostly database
> want to guarantee during db file update.
>
> F2FS has support atomic_write via ioctl, which is used by SQLite officially, I
> guess you can check its implementation detail.
>
> Thanks,
>

Thanks for your kind reply.
It's true that if we meet power failure before fsync() completes,
POSIX doen't require FS to recover the file. However, consider the
following situation:

1) Data block IOs (Not persisted)
2) Node block IOs (All Persisted)
3) Power failure

Since the node blocks are all persisted before power failure, the node
chain isn't broken. Note that this file's new data is not properly
persisted before crash. So the recovery process should be able to
recognize this situation and avoid recover this file. However, since
the node chain is not broken, perhaps the recovery process will regard
this file as recoverable?

Thanks!

> >
> > However, according to this study (https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast18/presentation/won), the persistent order of requests doesn't necessarily equals to the request finish order (due to device volatile caches). This means that its possible that the node blocks get persisted prior to data blocks.
> >
> > Does F2FS have other mechanisms to prevent such inconsistency? Or does it require the device to persist data without reordering?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Hongwei
> > _______________________________________________
> > Linux-f2fs-devel mailing list
> > Linux-f2fs-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-f2fs-devel
> >
>
>
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