Thread (9 messages) 9 messages, 4 authors, 2012-03-28

Re: what happened with dccaf33fa37 "ext4: flush any pending end_io requests before DIO" for 3.0?

From: Jiaying Zhang <hidden>
Date: 2012-03-19 17:10:12

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Jan Kara [off-list ref] wrote:
On Sat 17-03-12 13:31:30, Michael Tokarev wrote:
quoted
Ping?

Maybe just a one-line reply isn't THAT difficult?
Sorry for the slow response. I am not sure what happened to this patch.
Ted, do you know what we need to do to get this patch to the
stable release?

Jiaying
quoted
We've a data corruption bug in current longterm stable kernel
series which is known and has a fix and tagged for -stable for
over half a year already...
 Greg, any idea why this patch was not included?

                                                       Honza
quoted
On 28.02.2012 15:42, Michael Tokarev wrote:
quoted
Is there something wrong with my question?  I asked it 1.5 months ago...

Meanwhile, we're using this patch on our database server since
Aug-2011, and it appears to work correctly - direct and buffered
I/O works together without surprizes.  Without this patch, I see
unexpected results.

Thanks,

/mjt

On 01.12.2011 00:38, Michael Tokarev wrote:
quoted
Hello.

Back in August 2011, a commit has been tagged to be included
into stable, this one:

commit dccaf33fa37a1bc5d651baeb3bfeb6becb86597b
Author: Jiaying Zhang [off-list ref]
Date:   Fri Aug 19 19:13:32 2011 -0400

    ext4: flush any pending end_io requests before DIO reads w/dioread_nolock

    There is a race between ext4 buffer write and direct_IO read with
    dioread_nolock mount option enabled. The problem is that we clear
    PageWriteback flag during end_io time but will do
    uninitialized-to-initialized extent conversion later with dioread_nolock.
    If an O_direct read request comes in during this period, ext4 will return
    zero instead of the recently written data.

    This patch checks whether there are any pending uninitialized-to-initialized
    extent conversion requests before doing O_direct read to close the race.
    Note that this is just a bandaid fix. The fundamental issue is that we
    clear PageWriteback flag before we really complete an IO, which is
    problem-prone. To fix the fundamental issue, we may need to implement an
    extent tree cache that we can use to look up pending to-be-converted extents.

    Signed-off-by: Jiaying Zhang [off-list ref]
    Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" [off-list ref]
    Cc: stable@kernel.org


There was one more ext4 commit at that time, which made its way into
stable but this one did not.

I wonder if the reason for that was the fact that it needed a small
"backport" for 3.0, since in 3.1+ the code has been moved into another
file, and the context is slightly different.  In that case, attached
is the "backport" which we use with 3.0.x since that time.

Thanks!

/mjt
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Keyboard shortcuts
hback out one level
jnext message in thread
kprevious message in thread
ldrill in
Escclose help / fold thread tree
?toggle this help