Commit e9e3bcec authored by Eric Sandeen's avatar Eric Sandeen Committed by Theodore Ts'o
Browse files

ext4: serialize unaligned asynchronous DIO

ext4 has a data corruption case when doing non-block-aligned
asynchronous direct IO into a sparse file, as demonstrated
by xfstest 240.

The root cause is that while ext4 preallocates space in the
hole, mappings of that space still look "new" and 
dio_zero_block() will zero out the unwritten portions.  When
more than one AIO thread is going, they both find this "new"
block and race to zero out their portion; this is uncoordinated
and causes data corruption.

Dave Chinner fixed this for xfs by simply serializing all
unaligned asynchronous direct IO.  I've done the same here.
The difference is that we only wait on conversions, not all IO.
This is a very big hammer, and I'm not very pleased with
stuffing this into ext4_file_write().  But since ext4 is
DIO_LOCKING, we need to serialize it at this high level.

I tried to move this into ext4_ext_direct_IO, but by then
we have the i_mutex already, and we will wait on the
work queue to do conversions - which must also ta...
parent 2892c15d
Supports Markdown
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment