Re: [patch 12/16] fix race between writeback and unlink

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> The general VFS layer really shouldn't have assigned that strogn a meaning
>> to "i_nlink" anyway, it's not for the VFS layer to decide (and it only
>> causes problems for any non-UNIX-on-a-disk filesystems).

On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 12:19:36PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Yes, I suspect all the inode refcounting, locking, I_FREEING, I_LOCK, etc
> could do with a spring clean. Make it a bit more conventional.  I'll 
> discuss with Al when he resurfaces.

I'm somewhat concerned about the protection of ->i_size, since that
appears to be accessed in generic_file_read() without any protection
against writers to the field. From a quick glance at current 2.5 (it
looks like 2.4 has this too) it looks like it's written to by
vmtruncate() through notify_change() with the ->i_sem and BKL held at
the moment, but generic_file_read() doesn't take either before reading
it, and there may be still other writers. I also don't see the anything
like read_barrier_depends() for lockless algorithms or any atomic reads.
Even on machines with extremely strong memory consistency models like
i386, as loff_t is long long, it would seem possible to catch a partial
update and see an entirely bogus ->i_size value. It also appears
->i_size is used to provide some protection against reads of truncated
pages, which may be unreliable without some protection of ->i_size.

If these issues are not what I believe them to be I would be more than
happy to have these impressions corrected.

Cheers,
Bill