v6: === This is the sixth posting of the patchset to revamp the way writeback errors are tracked and reported. This is a smaller set than the last one. The main difference from the last set is that this one just adds errseq_t based error reporting for the purposes of fsync, while leaving the internal callers of filemap_* functions and the like largely untouched. Some of these patches have been posted separately, but I'm re-posting them here to make it clear that they're prerequisites to the later patches in the series. Background: =========== The basic problem is that we have (for a very long time) tracked and reported writeback errors based on two flags in the address_space: AS_EIO and AS_ENOSPC. Those flags are cleared when they are checked, so only the first caller to check them is able to consume them. That model is quite unreliable though, for several related reasons: * only the first fsync caller on the inode will see the error. In a world of containerized setups, that's no longer viable. Applications need to know that their writes are safely stored, and they can currently miss seeing errors that they should be aware of when they're not. * there are a lot of internal callers to filemap_fdatawait* and filemap_write_and_wait* that clear the error flags but then never report them to userland in any fashion. * Some internal callers report writeback errors, but can do so at non-sensical times. For instance, we might want to truncate a file, which triggers a pagecache flush. If that writeback fails, we might report that error to the truncate caller, but a subsequent fsync will likely not see it. * Some internal callers try to reset the error flags after clearing them, but that's racy. Another task could check the flags between those two events. Solution: ========= This patchset adds a new datatype called an errseq_t that represents a sequence of errors. It's a u32, with a field for a POSIX-flavor error and a counter, managed with atomics. We can sample that value at a particular point in time, and can later tell whether there have been any errors since that point. That allows us to provide traditional check-and-clear fsync semantics on every open file description in a lightweight fashion. fsync callers no longer need to coordinate between one another in order to ensure that errors at fsync time are handled correctly. Strategy: ========= The aim with this set is to do the minimum possible to support for reliable reporting of errors on fsync, without substantially changing the internals of the filesystems themselves. Most of the internal calls to filemap_fdatawait are left alone, so all of the internal error error checking is done using the traditional flag based checks. The only real difference here is more reliable reporting of errors at fsync. I think that we probably will want to eventually convert all of the internal callers to use errseq_t based reporting too, but that can be done in an incremental fashion in follow-on patchsets. Testing: ======== I've primarily been testing this with a couple of new xfstests that I will post separately. These tests use dm-error fault injection to flip the underlying block device to start throwing I/O errors, and then test the behavior of the filesystem layer on top of that. Jeff Layton (20): mm: fix mapping_set_error call in me_pagecache_dirty buffer: use mapping_set_error instead of setting the flag fs: check for writeback errors after syncing out buffers in generic_file_fsync buffer: set errors in mapping at the time that the error occurs mm: don't TestClearPageError in __filemap_fdatawait_range mm: drop "wait" parameter from write_one_page mm: clean up error handling in write_one_page lib: add errseq_t type and infrastructure for handling it fs: new infrastructure for writeback error handling and reporting mm: tracepoints for writeback error events mm: set both AS_EIO/AS_ENOSPC and errseq_t in mapping_set_error fs: add a new fstype flag to indicate how writeback errors are tracked Documentation: flesh out the section in vfs.txt on storing and reporting writeback errors dax: set errors in mapping when writeback fails fs: have call_fsync call filemap_report_wb_err if FS_WB_ERRSEQ is set block: convert to errseq_t based writeback error tracking fs: add f_md_wb_err field to struct file for tracking metadata errors ext4: use errseq_t based error handling for reporting data writeback errors xfs: minimal conversion to errseq_t writeback error reporting btrfs: minimal conversion to errseq_t writeback error reporting on fsync Documentation/filesystems/vfs.txt | 48 ++++++++- drivers/dax/device.c | 1 + fs/block_dev.c | 2 + fs/btrfs/super.c | 2 +- fs/buffer.c | 20 ++-- fs/dax.c | 18 +++- fs/exofs/dir.c | 2 +- fs/ext2/dir.c | 2 +- fs/ext2/file.c | 2 +- fs/ext4/dir.c | 8 +- fs/ext4/file.c | 5 +- fs/ext4/fsync.c | 23 ++++- fs/ext4/super.c | 6 +- fs/file_table.c | 1 + fs/gfs2/lops.c | 2 +- fs/jfs/jfs_metapage.c | 4 +- fs/libfs.c | 3 +- fs/minix/dir.c | 2 +- fs/open.c | 3 + fs/sysv/dir.c | 2 +- fs/ufs/dir.c | 2 +- fs/xfs/xfs_super.c | 2 +- include/linux/buffer_head.h | 1 + include/linux/errseq.h | 19 ++++ include/linux/fs.h | 80 +++++++++++++-- include/linux/mm.h | 2 +- include/linux/pagemap.h | 31 ++++-- include/trace/events/filemap.h | 52 ++++++++++ lib/Makefile | 2 +- lib/errseq.c | 208 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ mm/filemap.c | 91 ++++++++++++++--- mm/memory-failure.c | 2 +- mm/page-writeback.c | 21 ++-- 33 files changed, 595 insertions(+), 74 deletions(-) create mode 100644 include/linux/errseq.h create mode 100644 lib/errseq.c -- 2.13.0 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. 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