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

From: Jan Kara
Date: Tue Mar 24 2009 - 10:16:51 EST


On Tue 24-03-09 10:01:45, Chris Mason wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 14:26 +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> > On Tue 24-03-09 13:55:10, Jan Kara wrote:
>
> > > And one more interesting thing I don't yet fully understand - I see pages
> > > having PageError() set when they are removed from page cache (and they have
> > > been faulted in before). It's probably some interaction with pagecache
> > > readahead...
> > Argh... So the problem seems to be that get_block() occasionally returns
> > ENOSPC and we then discard the dirty data (hmm, we could give at least a
> > warning for that). I'm not yet sure why getblock behaves like this because
> > the filesystem seems to have enough space but anyway this seems to be some
> > strange fs trouble as well.
> >
>
> Ouch. Perhaps the free space is waiting on a journal commit?
Yes, exactly. I've already found there's lot of space hold by the
committing transaction (it can easily hold a few hundred megs or a few gigs
with larger journal and my UML images aren't that big...). And writepage()
implementation in ext3 does not have a logic to retry. Also
block_write_full_page() clears buffers dirty bits so it's not easy to retry
even if we did it. I'm now looking into how to fix this...

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>
SUSE Labs, CR
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