073861ed77
Twice now, when exercising ext4 looped on shmem huge pages, I have crashed on the PF_ONLY_HEAD check inside PageWaiters(): ext4_finish_bio() calling end_page_writeback() calling wake_up_page() on tail of a shmem huge page, no longer an ext4 page at all. The problem is that PageWriteback is not accompanied by a page reference (as the NOTE at the end of test_clear_page_writeback() acknowledges): as soon as TestClearPageWriteback has been done, that page could be removed from page cache, freed, and reused for something else by the time that wake_up_page() is reached. https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20200827122019.GC14765@casper.infradead.org/ Matthew Wilcox suggested avoiding or weakening the PageWaiters() tail check; but I'm paranoid about even looking at an unreferenced struct page, lest its memory might itself have already been reused or hotremoved (and wake_up_page_bit() may modify that memory with its ClearPageWaiters()). Then on crashing a second time, realized there's a stronger reason against that approach. If my testing just occasionally crashes on that check, when the page is reused for part of a compound page, wouldn't it be much more common for the page to get reused as an order-0 page before reaching wake_up_page()? And on rare occasions, might that reused page already be marked PageWriteback by its new user, and already be waited upon? What would that look like? It would look like BUG_ON(PageWriteback) after wait_on_page_writeback() in write_cache_pages() (though I have never seen that crash myself). Matthew Wilcox explaining this to himself: "page is allocated, added to page cache, dirtied, writeback starts, --- thread A --- filesystem calls end_page_writeback() test_clear_page_writeback() --- context switch to thread B --- truncate_inode_pages_range() finds the page, it doesn't have writeback set, we delete it from the page cache. Page gets reallocated, dirtied, writeback starts again. Then we call write_cache_pages(), see PageWriteback() set, call wait_on_page_writeback() --- context switch back to thread A --- wake_up_page(page, PG_writeback); ... thread B is woken, but because the wakeup was for the old use of the page, PageWriteback is still set. Devious" And prior to |
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README
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.