xfs: Don't use unwritten extents for DAX

DAX has a page fault serialisation problem with block allocation.
Because it allows concurrent page faults and does not have a page
lock to serialise faults to the same page, it can get two concurrent
faults to the page that race.

When two read faults race, this isn't a huge problem as the data
underlying the page is not changing and so "detect and drop" works
just fine. The issues are to do with write faults.

When two write faults occur, we serialise block allocation in
get_blocks() so only one faul will allocate the extent. It will,
however, be marked as an unwritten extent, and that is where the
problem lies - the DAX fault code cannot differentiate between a
block that was just allocated and a block that was preallocated and
needs zeroing. The result is that both write faults end up zeroing
the block and attempting to convert it back to written.

The problem is that the first fault can zero and convert before the
second fault starts zeroing, resulting in the zeroing for the second
fault overwriting the data that the first fault wrote with zeros.
The second fault then attempts to convert the unwritten extent,
which is then a no-op because it's already written. Data loss occurs
as a result of this race.

Because there is no sane locking construct in the page fault code
that we can use for serialisation across the page faults, we need to
ensure block allocation and zeroing occurs atomically in the
filesystem. This means we can still take concurrent page faults and
the only time they will serialise is in the filesystem
mapping/allocation callback. The page fault code will always see
written, initialised extents, so we will be able to remove the
unwritten extent handling from the DAX code when all filesystems are
converted.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/dax.c b/fs/dax.c
index 7ae6df7ea1d2..74033ad1bc92 100644
--- a/fs/dax.c
+++ b/fs/dax.c
@@ -29,6 +29,11 @@
 #include <linux/uio.h>
 #include <linux/vmstat.h>
 
+/*
+ * dax_clear_blocks() is called from within transaction context from XFS,
+ * and hence this means the stack from this point must follow GFP_NOFS
+ * semantics for all operations.
+ */
 int dax_clear_blocks(struct inode *inode, sector_t block, long size)
 {
 	struct block_device *bdev = inode->i_sb->s_bdev;