From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail143.messagelabs.com (mail143.messagelabs.com [216.82.254.35]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 748B86B003D for ; Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:16:15 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: ftruncate-mmap: pages are lost after writing to mmaped file. From: Peter Zijlstra In-Reply-To: <200903200248.22623.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> References: <604427e00903181244w360c5519k9179d5c3e5cd6ab3@mail.gmail.com> <604427e00903181654y308d57d8w2cb32eab831cf45a@mail.gmail.com> <200903200248.22623.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:16:01 +0100 Message-Id: <1237479361.24626.23.camel@twins> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Nick Piggin Cc: Ying Han , Jan Kara , Linus Torvalds , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel , linux-mm , guichaz@gmail.com, Alex Khesin , Mike Waychison , Rohit Seth List-ID: On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 02:48 +1100, Nick Piggin wrote: > On Thursday 19 March 2009 10:54:33 Ying Han wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Linus Torvalds > > > > wrote: > > > On Wed, 18 Mar 2009, Ying Han wrote: > > >> > Can you say what filesystem, and what mount-flags you use? Iirc, last > > >> > time we had MAP_SHARED lost writes it was at least partly triggered by > > >> > the filesystem doing its own flushing independently of the VM (ie ext3 > > >> > with "data=journal", I think), so that kind of thing does tend to > > >> > matter. > > >> > > >> /etc/fstab > > >> "/dev/hda1 / ext2 defaults 1 0" > > > > > > Sadly, /etc/fstab is not necessarily accurate for the root filesystem. At > > > least Fedora will ignore the flags in it. > > > > > > What does /proc/mounts say? That should be a more reliable indication of > > > what the kernel actually does. > > > > "/dev/root / ext2 rw,errors=continue 0 0" > > No luck with finding the problem yet. > > But I think we do have a race in __set_page_dirty_buffers(): > > The page may not have buffers between the mapping->private_lock > critical section and the __set_page_dirty call there. So between > them, another thread might do a create_empty_buffers which can > see !PageDirty and thus it will create clean buffers. The page > will get dirtied by the original thread, but if the buffers are > clean it can be cleaned without writing out buffers. > > Holding mapping->private_lock over the __set_page_dirty should > fix it, although I guess you'd want to release it before calling > __mark_inode_dirty so as not to put inode_lock under there. I > have a patch for this if it sounds reasonable. When I first did those dirty tracking patches someone (I think Andrew) commented no the fact that I did set_page_dirty() under one of these inner locks.. /me frobs around in archives for a bit.. - fs/buffers.c try_to_free_buffers(): remove clear_page_dirty() from under ->private_lock. This seems to be save, since ->private_lock is used to serialize access to the buffers, not the page itself. Hmm, that's a slightly different issue... But yeah, your scenario makes heaps of sense. Can't we do the TestSetPageDirty() before private_lock ? It's currently done before tree_lock as well. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org