Re: [PATCH] Re: innd mmap bug in 2.4.0-test12

Linus Torvalds
2000-12-28T19:25:52Z

On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, Daniel Phillips wrote:

> [in vmscan.c]
> > Between line 573 and 594 the page can have 1 user and be unlocked, so it
> > can be removed by invalidate_inode_pages, and the mapping will be
> > cleared here:
> > http://innominate.org/~graichen/projects/lxr/source/mm/filemap.c?v=v2.3#L98
>
> This seems like the obvious thing to do:
>
> --- 2.4.0-test13.clean/mm/filemap.c Fri Dec 29 03:14:58 2000
> +++ 2.4.0-test13/mm/filemap.c Fri Dec 29 03:16:21 2000
> @@ -96,6 +96,7 @@
> remove_page_from_inode_queue(page);
> remove_page_from_hash_queue(page);
> page->mapping = NULL;
> + ClearPageDirty(page);
> }
>
> void remove_inode_page(struct page *page)

No, I'd much rather have

if (PageDirty(page)) BUG();

there, and then have the free_swap_cache code clear the dirty bit.

We don't want to lose dirty bits by mistake. The only cases where it's ok
to clear the dirty bit is when we truncate a page completely (so it won't
be needed and obviously really shouldn't be written out) and when we've
lost the last user of a swap cache entry.

Any other cases might be bugs, where we remove a page from a mapping
without noticing that it is dirty (we had this bug in reclaim_pages(), for
example).

Linus