On Wed, Oct 07, 2015 at 08:32:16AM +0100, Linus Torvalds wrote: > And none of *those* requirements change just because "copied" would be > zero. If you avoid zeroing the buffers and marking them dirty, nothing > will ever initialize them on disk, andn if the prefault then later > fails during retry, no later write will happen either. So now > eventually later, a read() can see stale data from disk. Shoot. You're right, we could end up allowing a stale data to be exposed. If we knew the caller of write_end() was guaranteed to retry, we could skip the jbd2_journal_stop() call and keep the handle open, which would prevent the transaction from closing. But if the write gets abandoned, then the transaction would never close, and things would grind to a halt. > I do think this is an ext4 bug, and you'll need to do something *like* > that patch. Maybe Dave's patch is good as-is. It's the "I think you > need to do more" that I worry about. Not at -rc4 time. Not with a core > filesystem like ext4. Let's not hurry this too much. Agreed, I know what to do, and and the change is not something I'd want to get in -rc4. I'll target a fix for the next merge window. - Ted -- 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