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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@macmini.osdl.org>2006-12-29 10:00:58 -0800
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@macmini.osdl.org>2006-12-29 10:00:58 -0800
commit7658cc289288b8ae7dd2c2224549a048431222b3 (patch)
treebbd697764987e6eaf9cb8c49af3524d6a579dfdc /CREDITS
parent3bf8ba38f38d3647368e4edcf7d019f9f8d9184a (diff)
downloadop-kernel-dev-7658cc289288b8ae7dd2c2224549a048431222b3.zip
op-kernel-dev-7658cc289288b8ae7dd2c2224549a048431222b3.tar.gz
VM: Fix nasty and subtle race in shared mmap'ed page writeback
The VM layer (on the face of it, fairly reasonably) expected that when it does a ->writepage() call to the filesystem, it would write out the full page at that point in time. Especially since it had earlier marked the whole page dirty with "set_page_dirty()". But that isn't actually the case: ->writepage() does not actually write a page, it writes the parts of the page that have been explicitly marked dirty before, *and* that had not got written out for other reasons since the last time we told it they were dirty. That last caveat is the important one. Which _most_ of the time ends up being the whole page (since we had called "set_page_dirty()" on the page earlier), but if the filesystem had done any dirty flushing of its own (for example, to honor some internal write ordering guarantees), it might end up doing only a partial page IO (or none at all) when ->writepage() is actually called. That is the correct thing in general (since we actually often _want_ only the known-dirty parts of the page to be written out), but the shared dirty page handling had implicitly forgotten about these details, and had a number of cases where it was doing just the "->writepage()" part, without telling the low-level filesystem that the whole page might have been re-dirtied as part of being mapped writably into user space. Since most of the time the FS did actually write out the full page, we didn't notice this for a loong time, and this needed some really odd patterns to trigger. But it caused occasional corruption with rtorrent and with the Debian "apt" database, because both use shared mmaps to update the end result. This fixes it. Finally. After way too much hair-pulling. Acked-by: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Acked-by: Martin J. Bligh <mbligh@google.com> Acked-by: Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> Acked-by: Martin Johansson <martin@fatbob.nu> Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Acked-by: Andrei Popa <andrei.popa@i-neo.ro> Cc: High Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Cc: Segher Boessenkool <segher@kernel.crashing.org> Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> Cc: Gordon Farquharson <gordonfarquharson@gmail.com> Cc: Guillaume Chazarain <guichaz@yahoo.fr> Cc: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> Cc: Kenneth Cheng <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com> Cc: Tobias Diedrich <ranma@tdiedrich.de> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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