From: "Martin K. Petersen" Subject: Re: [PATCH 0 of 7] Block/SCSI Data Integrity Support Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:35:46 -0400 Message-ID: References: <170fa0d20807170655y6cb7df7eh6aae8c727b7b0bb@mail.gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: "Martin K. Petersen" , "Jeff Moyer" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: "Mike Snitzer" Return-path: In-Reply-To: <170fa0d20807170655y6cb7df7eh6aae8c727b7b0bb@mail.gmail.com> (Mike Snitzer's message of "Thu\, 17 Jul 2008 09\:55\:45 -0400") Sender: linux-scsi-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org >>>>> "Mike" == Mike Snitzer writes: >> I'm testing with XFS and btrfs. Generally doing kernel builds, >> etc. ext2/3 are still problematic because they modify pages in >> flight. Mike> Have you made the ext2/3/4 developers aware of this? Yep. Mike> Shouldn't _any_ filesystem "just work" given that the block Mike> layer is what is generating the checksums and then verifying Mike> them on read? Yep. There are a couple of issues. One problem is that pages are no longer locked down during I/O. Instead the writeback bit is being set to indicate that I/O is in progress. Not all corners of ext* have been adapted to that properly. Especially ext2 suffers and often modifies pages containing metadata while they are in flight. If I remember correctly, ext2/dir.c hasn't been made aware of writeback at all and assumes the page lock still works like it used to. That is normally not a huge problem because the page is being scheduled for write again shortly thereafter. So the inconsistent block on disk gets overwritten pretty much instantly. But that kind of sloppy behavior is a no-go with integrity checking turned on. There also appears to be some quirks in the page cache in general. There's something not quite right in clear_page_dirty() / page_mkwrite() territory. If I sync excessively I can make any fs keel over. peterz said that an mmapped page is supposed to be read-only during writeback but that appears to be racy when a forced sync is involved. That's my recollection, anyway. I've been busy with the innards of the integrity code stuff for a couple of months and haven't poked at the fs/vm issues for a while. -- Martin K. Petersen Oracle Linux Engineering