Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:01:06 -0700
From: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
To: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@novell.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>,
       an.li.wang@intel.com
Subject: Re: truncate shows non zero data beyond the end of the inode with MAP_SHARED
Message-ID: <20040915210106.GX9106@holomorphy.com>
References: <20040915122920.GA4454@dualathlon.random>
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On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 02:29:20PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> I've been told we're not posix compliant the way we handle MAP_SHARED
> on the last page of the inode. Basically after we map the page into
> userspace people can make the data beyond the i_size non-zero and we
> should clear it in the transition from page_mapcount 1 -> 0.  The bug
> is that if you truncate-extend, the new data will not be guaranteed to
> be zero.
> msync + power outage and writing to the page with sys_write at the same
> time it's being mapped (and in turn queueing it for pdflush writeout)
> are the two worst offeners. To fix those we'd need to mark the pte
> readonly, flush the tlb with a worst-case IPI broadcast, writepage, then
> mark the pte read-write and flush the tlb again with another IPI
> broadcast.
> That is going to have a significant cost methinks. So maybe we shouldn't
> fix it after all...

Zeroing the final partial page during expanding truncate (flushing TLB)
sounds like a reasonable half measure; we don't do anything at the moment.
We could even, say, do a pass of pte shootdown given try_to_unmap() and
force minor faults to make all this less likely.


-- wli
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