From: Nick Piggin Subject: Re: fsx-linux loosing mmap() writes under memory pressure Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 13:55:43 +1100 Message-ID: <200903051355.43909.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> References: <20090304145109.GA7140@duck.suse.cz> <20090304155535.GA23108@duck.suse.cz> <20090304175031.GA24730@duck.suse.cz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, user-mode-linux-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Jan Kara , Andrew Morton Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20090304175031.GA24730@duck.suse.cz> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org On Thursday 05 March 2009 04:50:31 Jan Kara wrote: > On Wed 04-03-09 16:55:35, Jan Kara wrote: > > On Wed 04-03-09 15:51:09, Jan Kara wrote: > > > first, I'd like to point out that this has happened under UML so it > > > can be just some obscure bug in that architecture but I belive it's > > > worth debugging anyway. Now to the problem: > > > This has happened with today Linus's git snapshot. The filesystem is > > > ext3 with *1KB* blocksize. I booted UML with 64MB of memory and run > > > (these are test's from Andrew Morton's torture tests): > > > fsx-linux -l 8000000 /mnt/testfile > > > bash-shared-mapping -t 8 /mnt/bashfile 50000000 > > > (the second test just makes the UML under memory pressure and stresses > > > the filesystem, otherwise it does not interact with fsx-linux in any > > > way). After some time (like an hour) fsx-linux reported the file is > > > corrupted. I tried again and it happened again so probably some > > > debugging should be possible. > > > Both times it seems we've simply completely lost a write which > > > happened through mmap (2 pages in the first case, 3 pages in the second > > > case). Also I've checked and in the first case no blocks are allocated > > > for the offsets where the data should be so most probably we've lost > > > the write before block_write_full_page() called get_block(). > > > I'll debug this further but I wanted let people know there's some > > > problem and maybe somebody has some bright idea :). I'm attaching the > > > log from fsx if someone is interested. > > > > Testing a bit more, I managed to reproduce the problem on ext2 and > > what's more strange, now the lost page was written via ordinary write() > > (fsxlog attached). So I believe this is more likely to be UML specific... > > And to add even more information, this also happens on ext2 with 4KB > blocksize (although much more rarely it seems). Again the data was written > by an extending write() but the block for it was not even allocated... What block device driver are you using? Can it be reproduced without mapped reads and writes completely? (-W -R)