Re: [RFC PATCH] dax, ext2, ext4, XFS: fix data corruption race

Matthew Wilcox
2016-01-26T14:47:57Z

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 02:05:21PM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Tue 26-01-16 07:48:12, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > I *think* that what Dave's proposing (and if he isn't, I'm proposing it
> > for him) is that the filesystem takes its allocation lock shared during
> > the ->fault handler, then in the ->page_mkwrite handler, it knows that an
> > allocation is coming, so it takes its allocation lock in exclusive mode.
> >
> > So read vs write faults won't be able to race because the allocation lock
> > will prevent it.
>
> So this is correct and clean design but we will take the lock in exclusive
> mode (and thus hurt scalability) for every write fault, not just for the
> ones allocating blocks. And at the moment we take exclusive lock for write
> faults, there's no more need for having the hole page instantiated - we can
> still do it for simplicity but it's no longer necessary to avoid data
> corruption.

In my mind we take it only for allocating writes, because we also include
the patch to insert PFNs with the writable bit set in the dax_fault
handler if the page fault was for writes.

Although that only works when the *first* fault is a write ... if we
read and page then write the same page, we will indeed take the lock
in exclusive mode. I think that's fixable too -- in the page_mkwrite
handler, take the lock in exclusive mode only if there's a page in the
radix tree. I'll take a look at that optimisation after doing the first
couple of steps.