Re: Race between vmtruncate and mapped areas?

From: Andrew Morton (akpm@digeo.com)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 13:53:19 EST


Dave McCracken <dmccr@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>
> --On Wednesday, May 14, 2003 11:17:48 -0700 Andrew Morton <akpm@digeo.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I think it might be sufficient to re-check the page against i_size
> > after IO completion in filemap_nopage().
>
> It would definitely make the window a lot smaller, though it won't quite
> close it. To be entirely safe we'd need to recheck after we've retaken
> page_table_lock.

hmm.

One possible timing diagram is

        truncate: pagefault:

                                                check i_size

                                                grab page
        drop i_size

        shoot down pagetables

                                                install in pagetables

        truncate file

converting i_sem to an rwsem and taking it in the pagefault would certainly
stitch it up. Unpopular, very messy.

Could "truncate file" return some code to say pages were left behind, so
truncate re-runs zap_page_range()? Sounds unpleasant.

Yes, re-checking the page against i_size from do_no_page() would fix it up.
 But damn, that's another indirect call, 64-bit math, etc on _every_
file-backed pagefault.

Remind me again what problem this whole thing is currently causing?

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 15 2003 - 22:00:53 EST