FS-Cache: The retrieval remaining-pages counter needs to be atomic_t
authorDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Tue, 21 May 2013 12:44:15 +0000 (13:44 +0100)
committerDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:16:47 +0000 (14:16 +0100)
commit1bb4b7f98f361132ea322834515334d95b93c184
treeebe77590c4d49beaf7c1504475c53d625b03d882
parent2144bc78d41fe31ba58ffdd48571a54d3ca6b5fe
FS-Cache: The retrieval remaining-pages counter needs to be atomic_t

struct fscache_retrieval contains a count of the number of pages that still
need some processing (n_pages).  This is decremented as the pages are
processed.

However, this needs to be atomic as fscache_retrieval_complete() (I think) just
occasionally may be called from cachefiles_read_backing_file() and
cachefiles_read_copier() simultaneously.

This happens when an fscache_read_or_alloc_pages() request containing a lot of
pages (say a couple of hundred) is being processed.  The read on each backing
page is dispatched individually because we need to insert a monitor into the
waitqueue to catch when the read completes.  However, under low-memory
conditions, we might be forced to wait in the allocator - and this gives the
I/O on the backing page a chance to complete first.

When the I/O completes, fscache_enqueue_retrieval() chucks the retrieval onto
the workqueue without waiting for the operation to finish the initial I/O
dispatch (we want to release any pages we can as soon as we can), thus both can
end up running simultaneously and potentially attempting to partially complete
the retrieval simultaneously (ENOMEM may occur, backing pages may already be in
the page cache).

This was demonstrated by parallelling the non-atomic counter with an atomic
counter and printing both of them when the assertion fails.  At this point, the
atomic counter has reached zero, but the non-atomic counter has not.

To fix this, make the counter an atomic_t.

This results in the following bug appearing

FS-Cache: Assertion failed
3 == 5 is false
------------[ cut here ]------------
kernel BUG at fs/fscache/operation.c:421!

or

FS-Cache: Assertion failed
3 == 5 is false
------------[ cut here ]------------
kernel BUG at fs/fscache/operation.c:414!

With a backtrace like the following:

RIP: 0010:[<ffffffffa0211b1d>] fscache_put_operation+0x1ad/0x240 [fscache]
Call Trace:
 [<ffffffffa0213185>] fscache_retrieval_work+0x55/0x270 [fscache]
 [<ffffffffa0213130>] ? fscache_retrieval_work+0x0/0x270 [fscache]
 [<ffffffff81090b10>] worker_thread+0x170/0x2a0
 [<ffffffff81096d10>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x40
 [<ffffffff810909a0>] ? worker_thread+0x0/0x2a0
 [<ffffffff81096966>] kthread+0x96/0xa0
 [<ffffffff8100c0ca>] child_rip+0xa/0x20
 [<ffffffff810968d0>] ? kthread+0x0/0xa0
 [<ffffffff8100c0c0>] ? child_rip+0x0/0x20

Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Reviewed-and-tested-By: Milosz Tanski <milosz@adfin.com>
Acked-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>
fs/fscache/page.c
include/linux/fscache-cache.h