Re: Known and unfixed active data loss bug in MM + XFS with large folios since Dec 2021 (any kernel from 6.1 upwards)

Linus Torvalds
2024-09-12T22:26:10Z

On Thu, 12 Sept 2024 at 15:12, Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> wrote:
>
> When I saw Christian's report, I seemed to recall that we ran into this
> at Meta too. And we did, and hence have been reverting it since our 5.19
> release (and hence 6.4, 6.9, and 6.11 next). We should not be shipping
> things that are known broken.

I do think that if we have big sites just reverting it as known broken
and can't figure out why, we should do so upstream too.

Yes, it's going to make it even harder to figure out what's wrong.
Not great. But if this causes filesystem corruption, that sure isn't
great either. And people end up going "I'll use ext4 which doesn't
have the problem", that's not exactly helpful either.

And yeah, the reason ext4 doesn't have the problem is simply because
ext4 doesn't enable large folios. So that doesn't pin anything down
either (ie it does *not* say "this is an xfs bug" - it obviously might
be, but it's probably more likely some large-folio issue).

Other filesystems do enable large folios (afs, bcachefs, erofs, nfs,
smb), but maybe just not be used under the kind of load to show it.

Honestly, the fact that it hasn't been reverted after apparently
people knowing about it for months is a bit shocking to me. Filesystem
people tend to take unknown corruption issues as a big deal. What
makes this so special? Is it because the XFS people don't consider it
an XFS issue, so...

Linus