Re: ftruncate-mmap: pages are lost after writing to mmaped file.

[Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>]

On Tue 24-03-09 16:48:14, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Wed 25-03-09 02:03:54, Nick Piggin wrote:
> > On Wednesday 25 March 2009 01:47:09 Jan Kara wrote:
> > > On Wed 25-03-09 01:30:00, Nick Piggin wrote:
> > 
> > > > I don't think it is a very good idea for block_write_full_page recovery
> > > > to do clear_buffer_dirty for !mapped buffers. I think that should rather
> > > > be a redirty_page_for_writepage in the case that the buffer is dirty.
> > > >
> > > > Perhaps not the cleanest way to solve the problem if it is just due to
> > > > transient shortage of space in ext3, but generic code shouldn't be
> > > > allowed to throw away dirty data even if it can't be written back due
> > > > to some software or hardware error.
> > >
> > >   Well, that would be one possibility. But then we'd be left with dirty
> > > pages we cannot ever release since they are constantly dirty (when the
> > > filesystem really becomes out of space). So what I
> > 
> > If the filesystem becomes out of space and we have over-committed these
> > dirty mmapped blocks, then we most definitely want to keep them around.
> > An error of the system losing a few pages (or if it happens an insanely
> > large number of times, then slowly dying due to memory leak) is better
> > than an app suddenly seeing the contents of the page change to nulls
> > under it when the kernel decides to do some page reclaim.
>   Hmm, probably you're right. Definitely it would be much easier to track
> the problem down than it is now... Thinking a bit more... But couldn't a
> malicious user bring the machine easily to OOM this way? That would be
> unfortunate.
  OK, below is the patch which makes things work for me (i.e. no data
lost). What do you think?

									Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR