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authorHugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>2008-02-04 22:28:55 -0800
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>2008-02-05 09:44:16 -0800
commit1b1b32f2c6f6bb32535d2da62075b51c980880eb (patch)
tree686aac685a4c04f085dc17cc1a05910149a04933 /CREDITS
parentb409f9fcf04692c0f603d28c73d2e3dfed27bf54 (diff)
tmpfs: fix shmem_swaplist races
Intensive swapoff testing shows shmem_unuse spinning on an entry in shmem_swaplist pointing to itself: how does that come about? Days pass... First guess is this: shmem_delete_inode tests list_empty without taking the global mutex (so the swapping case doesn't slow down the common case); but there's an instant in shmem_unuse_inode's list_move_tail when the list entry may appear empty (a rare case, because it's actually moving the head not the the list member). So there's a danger of leaving the inode on the swaplist when it's freed, then reinitialized to point to itself when reused. Fix that by skipping the list_move_tail when it's a no-op, which happens to plug this. But this same spinning then surfaces on another machine. Ah, I'd never suspected it, but shmem_writepage's swaplist manipulation is unsafe: though we still hold page lock, which would hold off inode deletion if the page were in pagecache, it doesn't hold off once it's in swapcache (free_swap_and_cache doesn't wait on locked pages). Hmm: we could put the the inode on swaplist earlier, but then shmem_unuse_inode could never prune unswapped inodes. Fix this with an igrab before dropping info->lock, as in shmem_unuse_inode; though I am a little uneasy about the iput which has to follow - it works, and I see nothing wrong with it, but it is surprising that shmem inode deletion may now occur below shmem_writepage. Revisit this fix later? And while we're looking at these races: the way shmem_unuse tests swapped without holding info->lock looks unsafe, if we've more than one swap area: a racing shmem_writepage on another page of the same inode could be putting it in swapcache, just as we're deciding to remove the inode from swaplist - there's a danger of going on swap without being listed, so a later swapoff would hang, being unable to locate the entry. Move that test and removal down into shmem_unuse_inode, once info->lock is held. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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