Re: [PATCH] Scalable page cache

[Andrew Morton]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> In article <[e-mail]> you write:
> >
> >Here's the current rolled-up ext3 diff which I've been using.
> >It needs to be resynced with pestiferous ext3 CVS, changelogged
> >and pushed out this week.
> >
> >--- linux-2.4.15-pre9/fs/ext3/inode.c  Thu Nov 22 10:56:33 2001
> >+++ linux-akpm/fs/ext3/inode.c Thu Nov 22 11:07:03 2001
> >@@ -1026,9 +1026,20 @@ static int ext3_prepare_write(struct fil
> >       if (ret != 0)
> >               goto prepare_write_failed;
> >
> >-      if (ext3_should_journal_data(inode))
> >+      if (ext3_should_journal_data(inode)) {
> >               ret = walk_page_buffers(handle, page->buffers,
> >                               from, to, NULL, do_journal_get_write_access);
> >+              if (ret) {
> >+                      /*
> >+                       * We're going to fail this prepare_write(),
> >+                       * so commit_write() will not be called.
> >+                       * We need to undo block_prepare_write()'s kmap().
> >+                       * AKPM: Do we need to clear PageUptodate?  I don't
> >+                       * think so.
> >+                       */
> >+                      kunmap(page);
> >+              }
> >+      }
> 
> This is wrong.
> 
> The generic VM layer does the kmap/kunmap itself these days (it really
> always should have - it needs the page mapped itself for the memcpy
> anyway, and depending on the low-level FS to do kmap/kunmap was an ugly
> layering violation).

Actually the comment is a bit misleading.

We've called block_prepare_write(), which has done the kmap.
But even though block_prepare_write() returned success, this
call to the filesystem's ->prepare_write() is about to fail.

So the caller of ->prepare_write() isn't going to run ->commit_write(),
and we have to undo the kmap here.

> So you should just remove all the kmap/kunmap stuff in
> prepare/commit_write instead of adding more of them to handle the
> brokenness.

There have been a number of mistakes made over this particular kmap()
operation.  NFS client had it wrong for a while. I think sct had
some proposal for making it more robust.

-