Re: fs corruption exposed by "xfs: increase prealloc size to double that of the previous extent"

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 11:11:30AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:

> Yes, we've known about this since 2011.  Right - that's a long
> standing problem, and one I've never been able to isolate and so
> reproduce with any luck. It can only be reproduced when you use mmap
> and direct IO on the same file, and every time I've added debug to
> find out where the tail block corruption was being introduced, the
> data corruption goes away. It behaves just like a race condition....

See downthread.  And I would be *very* surprised if it was a race -
don't forget the msync() done before that write().

I think I know what's going on - O_DIRECT write starting a bit before
EOF on a file with the last extent that can be grown.  It fills
a buffer_head with b_size extending quite a bit past the EOF; the
blocks are really allocated.  What causes the problem is that we
have the flags set for the *first* block.  IOW, buffer_new(bh) is
false - the first block has already been allocated.  And for
direct-io.c it means "no zeroing the tail of the last block".