[PATCH 6.12 397/567] dm-ebs: Mark full buffer dirty even on partial write

Greg Kroah-Hartman
2026-01-06T17:36:09Z

From: Uladzislau Rezki (Sony) <urezki@gmail.com>

commit 7fa3e7d114abc9cc71cc35d768e116641074ddb4 upstream.

When performing a read-modify-write(RMW) operation, any modification
to a buffered block must cause the entire buffer to be marked dirty.

Marking only a subrange as dirty is incorrect because the underlying
device block size(ubs) defines the minimum read/write granularity. A
lower device can perform I/O only on regions which are fully aligned
and sized to ubs.

This change ensures that write-back operations always occur in full
ubs-sized chunks, matching the intended emulation semantics of the
EBS target.

As for user space visible impact, submitting sub-ubs and misaligned
I/O for devices which are tuned to ubs sizes only, will reject such
requests, therefore it can lead to losing data. Example:

1) Create a 8K nvme device in qemu by adding

-device nvme,drive=drv0,serial=foo,logical_block_size=8192,physical_block_size=8192

2) Setup dm-ebs to emulate 512B to 8K mapping

urezki@pc638:~/bin$ cat dmsetup.sh

lower=/dev/nvme0n1
len=$(blockdev --getsz "$lower")

echo "0 $len ebs $lower 0 1 16" | dmsetup create nvme-8k
urezki@pc638:~/bin$

offset 0, ebs=1 and ubs=16(in sectors).

3) Create an ext4 filesystem(default 4K block size)

urezki@pc638:~/bin$ sudo mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/dm-0
mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
Discarding device blocks: done
Creating filesystem with 2072576 4k blocks and 518144 inodes
Filesystem UUID: bd0b6ca6-0506-4e31-86da-8d22c9d50b63
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (16384 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: mkfs.ext4: Input/output error while writing out and closing file system
urezki@pc638:~/bin$ dmesg

<snip>
[ 1618.875449] buffer_io_error: 1028 callbacks suppressed
[ 1618.875456] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 0, lost async page write
[ 1618.875527] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 1, lost async page write
[ 1618.875602] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 2, lost async page write
[ 1618.875620] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 3, lost async page write
[ 1618.875639] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 4, lost async page write
[ 1618.894316] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 5, lost async page write
[ 1618.894358] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 6, lost async page write
[ 1618.894380] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 7, lost async page write
[ 1618.894405] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 8, lost async page write
[ 1618.894427] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 9, lost async page write
<snip>

Many I/O errors because the lower 8K device rejects sub-ubs/misaligned
requests.

with a patch:

urezki@pc638:~/bin$ sudo mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/dm-0
mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
Discarding device blocks: done
Creating filesystem with 2072576 4k blocks and 518144 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 9b54f44f-ef55-4bd4-9e40-c8b775a616ac
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (16384 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

urezki@pc638:~/bin$ sudo mount /dev/dm-0 /mnt/
urezki@pc638:~/bin$ ls -al /mnt/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 17 15:13 .
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4096 Jul 10 19:42 ..
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Oct 17 15:13 lost+found
urezki@pc638:~/bin$

After this change: mkfs completes; mount succeeds.

Signed-off-by: Uladzislau Rezki (Sony) <urezki@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
---
drivers/md/dm-ebs-target.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

--- a/drivers/md/dm-ebs-target.c
+++ b/drivers/md/dm-ebs-target.c
@@ -103,7 +103,7 @@ static int __ebs_rw_bvec(struct ebs_c *e
} else {
flush_dcache_page(bv->bv_page);
memcpy(ba, pa, cur_len);
- dm_bufio_mark_partial_buffer_dirty(b, buf_off, buf_off + cur_len);
+ dm_bufio_mark_buffer_dirty(b);
}

dm_bufio_release(b);