Thread (11 messages) 11 messages, 3 authors, 2014-02-03

Re: [PATCH] block devices: validate block device capacity

From: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Date: 2014-01-31 00:21:03
Also in: dm-devel, linux-ide, linux-mm, linux-scsi, lkml


On Thu, 30 Jan 2014, James Bottomley wrote:
On Thu, 2014-01-30 at 18:10 -0500, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
quoted
On Thu, 30 Jan 2014, James Bottomley wrote:
quoted
Why is this?  the whole reason for CONFIG_LBDAF is supposed to be to
allow 64 bit offsets for block devices on 32 bit.  It sounds like
there's somewhere not using sector_t ... or using it wrongly which needs
fixing.
The page cache uses unsigned long as a page index. Therefore, if unsigned 
long is 32-bit, the block device may have at most 2^32-1 pages.
Um, that's the index into the mapping, not the device; a device can have
multiple mappings and each mapping has a radix tree of pages.  For most
filesystems a mapping is equivalent to a file, so we can have large
filesystems, but they can't have files over actually 4GB on 32 bits
otherwise mmap fails.
A device may be accessed direcly (by opening /dev/sdX) and it creates a 
mapping too - thus, the size of a mapping limits the size of a block 
device.

The main problem is that pgoff_t has 4 bytes - chaning it to 8 bytes may 
fix it - but there may be some hidden places where pgoff is converted to 
unsigned long - who knows, if they exist or not?
Are we running into a problems with struct address_space where we've
assumed the inode belongs to the file and lvm is doing something where
it's the whole device?
lvm creates a 64TiB device, udev runs blkid on that device and blkid opens 
the device and gets stuck because of unsigned long overflow.
quoted
quoted
quoted
On 32-bit architectures, we must limit block device size to
PAGE_SIZE*(2^32-1).
So you're saying CONFIG_LBDAF can never work, why?

James
CONFIG_LBDAF works, but it doesn't allow unlimited capacity: on x86, 
without CONFIG_LBDAF, the limit is 2TiB. With CONFIG_LBDAF, the limit is 
16TiB (4096*2^32).
I don't think the people who did the large block device work expected to
gain only 3 bits for all their pain.

James
One could change it to have three choices:
2TiB limit - 32-bit sector_t and 32-bit pgoff_t
16TiB limit - 64-bit sector_t and 32-bit pgoff_t
32PiB limit - 64-bit sector_t and 64-bit pgoff_t

Though, we need to know if the people who designed memory management agree 
with changing pgoff_t to 64 bits.

Mikulas

--
To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in
the body to majordomo@kvack.org.  For more info on Linux MM,
see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ .
Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@kvack.org"> email@kvack.org </a>
Keyboard shortcuts
hback out one level
jnext message in thread
kprevious message in thread
ldrill in
Escclose help / fold thread tree
?toggle this help