On Mon 22-10-12 12:38:52, Andrew Morton wrote: > On Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:06:46 +0200 > Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On s390 any write to a page (even from kernel itself) sets architecture > > specific page dirty bit. Thus when a page is written to via buffered write, HW > > dirty bit gets set and when we later map and unmap the page, page_remove_rmap() > > finds the dirty bit and calls set_page_dirty(). > > > > Dirtying of a page which shouldn't be dirty can cause all sorts of problems to > > filesystems. The bug we observed in practice is that buffers from the page get > > freed, so when the page gets later marked as dirty and writeback writes it, XFS > > crashes due to an assertion BUG_ON(!PagePrivate(page)) in page_buffers() called > > from xfs_count_page_state(). > > > > Similar problem can also happen when zero_user_segment() call from > > xfs_vm_writepage() (or block_write_full_page() for that matter) set the > > hardware dirty bit during writeback, later buffers get freed, and then page > > unmapped. > > > > Fix the issue by ignoring s390 HW dirty bit for page cache pages of mappings > > with mapping_cap_account_dirty(). This is safe because for such mappings when a > > page gets marked as writeable in PTE it is also marked dirty in do_wp_page() or > > do_page_fault(). When the dirty bit is cleared by clear_page_dirty_for_io(), > > the page gets writeprotected in page_mkclean(). So pagecache page is writeable > > if and only if it is dirty. > > > > Thanks to Hugh Dickins <hughd@xxxxxxxxxx> for pointing out mapping has to have > > mapping_cap_account_dirty() for things to work and proposing a cleaned up > > variant of the patch. > > > > The patch has survived about two hours of running fsx-linux on tmpfs while > > heavily swapping and several days of running on out build machines where the > > original problem was triggered. > > That seems a fairly serious problem. To which kernel version(s) should > we apply the fix? Well, XFS will crash starting from 2.6.36 kernel where the assertion was added. Previously XFS just silently added buffers (as other filesystems do it) and wrote / redirtied the page (unnecessarily). So looking into maintained -stable branches I think pushing the patch to -stable from 3.0 on should be enough. > > diff --git a/mm/rmap.c b/mm/rmap.c > > It's a bit surprising that none of the added comments mention the s390 > pte-dirtying oddity. I don't see an obvious place to mention this, but > I for one didn't know about this and it would be good if we could > capture the info _somewhere_? As Hugh says, the comment before page_test_and_clear_dirty() is somewhat updated. But do you mean recording somewhere the catch that s390 HW dirty bit gets set also whenever we write to a page from kernel? I guess we could add that also to the comment before page_test_and_clear_dirty() in page_remove_rmap() and also before definition of page_test_and_clear_dirty(). So most people that will add / remove these calls will be warned. OK? Honza -- Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> SUSE Labs, CR -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>