Re: Another proposal for DAX fault locking

From: Dmitry Monakhov
Date: Wed Feb 10 2016 - 07:30:44 EST


Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I was thinking about current issues with DAX fault locking [1] (data
> corruption due to racing faults allocating blocks) and also races which
> currently don't allow us to clear dirty tags in the radix tree due to races
> between faults and cache flushing [2]. Both of these exist because we don't
> have an equivalent of page lock available for DAX. While we have a
> reasonable solution available for problem [1], so far I'm not aware of a
> decent solution for [2]. After briefly discussing the issue with Mel he had
> a bright idea that we could used hashed locks to deal with [2] (and I think
> we can solve [1] with them as well). So my proposal looks as follows:
>
> DAX will have an array of mutexes (the array can be made per device but
> initially a global one should be OK). We will use mutexes in the array as a
> replacement for page lock - we will use hashfn(mapping, index) to get
> particular mutex protecting our offset in the mapping. On fault / page
> mkwrite, we'll grab the mutex similarly to page lock and release it once we
> are done updating page tables. This deals with races in [1]. When flushing
> caches we grab the mutex before clearing writeable bit in page tables
> and clearing dirty bit in the radix tree and drop it after we have flushed
> caches for the pfn. This deals with races in [2].
>
> Thoughts?
Agree, only small note:
Hash locks has side effect for batch locking due to collision.
Some times we want to lock several pages/entries (migration/defragmentation)
So we will endup with deadlock due to hash collision.
>
> Honza
>
> [1] http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2016-01/msg00575.html
> [2] https://lists.01.org/pipermail/linux-nvdimm/2016-January/004057.html
>
> --
> Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxxx>
> SUSE Labs, CR
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