On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:44:21 +1100 Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> On Friday 20 March 2009 03:46:39 Jan Kara wrote: >> > On Fri 20-03-09 02:48:21, Nick Piggin wrote: >> >> > > Holding mapping->private_lock over the __set_page_dirty should >> > > fix it, although I guess you'd want to release it before calling >> > > __mark_inode_dirty so as not to put inode_lock under there. I >> > > have a patch for this if it sounds reasonable. >> > >> > Yes, that seems to be a bug - the function actually looked suspitious to >> > me yesterday but I somehow convinced myself that it's fine. Probably >> > because fsx-linux is single-threaded. >> >> >> After a whole lot of chasing my own tail in the VM and buffer layers, >> I think it is a problem in ext2 (and I haven't been able to reproduce >> with ext3 yet, which might lend weight to that, although as we have >> seen, it is very timing dependent). >> >> That would be slightly unfortunate because we still have Jan's ext3 >> problem, and also another reported problem of corruption on ext3 (on >> brd driver). >> >> Anyway, when I have reproduced the problem with the test case, the >> "lost" writes are all reported to be holes. Unfortunately, that doesn't >> point straight to the filesystem, because ext2 allocates blocks in this >> case at writeout time, so if dirty bits are getting lost, then it would >> be normal to see holes. >> >> I then put in a whole lot of extra infrastructure to track metadata about >> each struct page (when it was last written out, when it last had the number >> of writable ptes reach 0, when the dirty bits were last cleared etc). And >> none of the normal asertions were triggering: eg. when any page is removed >> from pagecache (except truncates), it has always had all its buffers >> written out *after* all ptes were made readonly or unmapped. Lots of other >> tests and crap like that. >> >> So I tried what I should have done to start with and did an e2fsck after >> seeing corruption. Yes, it comes up with errors. > > Do you recall what the errors were? I run e2fsck on the partition after the failure happened and here is what i saw, not sure if that is the same message Jan looked at: e2fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008) Warning! /dev/hda1 is mounted. /dev/hda1 contains a file system with errors, check forced. Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Pass 2: Checking directory structure Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity Pass 4: Checking reference counts Pass 5: Checking group summary information Block bitmap differences: +74915 -195111 -224680 Fix? no Free blocks count wrong for group #6 (170, counted=169). Fix? no Free blocks count wrong (10120, counted=523). Fix? no Free inodes count wrong (95678, counted=95672). Fix? no /dev/hda1: ********** WARNING: Filesystem still has errors ********** /dev/hda1: 35938/131616 files (1.5% non-contiguous), 252936/263056 blocks --Ying > >> Now that is unusual >> because that should be largely insulated from the vm: if a dirty bit gets >> lost, then the filesystem image should be quite happy and error-free with >> a hole or unwritten data there. >> >> I don't know ext? locking very well, except that it looks pretty overly >> complex and crufty. >> >> Usually, blocks are instantiated by write(2), under i_mutex, serialising >> the allocator somewhat. mmap-write blocks are instantiated at writeout >> time, unserialised. I moved truncate_mutex to cover the entire get_blocks >> function, and can no longer trigger the problem. Might be a timing issue >> though -- Ying, can you try this and see if you can still reproduce? >> >> I close my eyes and pick something out of a hat. a686cd89. Search for XXX. >> Nice. Whether or not this cased the problem, can someone please tell me >> why it got merged in that state? >> >> I'm leaving ext3 running for now. It looks like a nasty task to bisect >> ext2 down to that commit :( and I would be more interested in trying to >> reproduce Jan's ext3 problem, however, because I'm not too interested in >> diving into ext2 locking to work out exactly what is racing and how to >> fix it properly. I suspect it would be most productive to wire up some >> ioctls right into the block allocator/lookup and code up a userspace >> tester for it that could probably stress it a lot harder than kernel >> writeout can. > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
