• Anssi Hannula's avatar
    dm cache: fix race causing dirty blocks to be marked as clean · 40aa978e
    Anssi Hannula authored
    When a writeback or a promotion of a block is completed, the cell of
    that block is removed from the prison, the block is marked as clean, and
    the clear_dirty() callback of the cache policy is called.
    
    Unfortunately, performing those actions in this order allows an incoming
    new write bio for that block to come in before clearing the dirty status
    is completed and therefore possibly causing one of these two scenarios:
    
    Scenario A:
    
    Thread 1                      Thread 2
    cell_defer()                  .
    - cell removed from prison    .
    - detained bios queued        .
    .                             incoming write bio
    .                             remapped to cache
    .                             set_dirty() called,
    .                               but block already dirty
    .                               => it does nothing
    clear_dirty()                 .
    - block marked clean          .
    - policy clear_dirty() called .
    
    Result: Block is marked clean even though it is actually dirty. No
    writeback will occur.
    
    Scenario B:
    
    Thread 1                      Thread 2
    cell_defer()                  .
    - cell removed from prison    .
    - detained bios queued        .
    clear_dirty()                 .
    - block marked clean          .
    .                             incoming write bio
    .                             remapped to cache
    .                             set_dirty() called
    .                             - block marked dirty
    .                             - policy set_dirty() called
    - policy clear_dirty() called .
    
    Result: Block is properly marked as dirty, but policy thinks it is clean
    and therefore never asks us to writeback it.
    This case is visible in "dmsetup status" dirty block count (which
    normally decreases to 0 on a quiet device).
    
    Fix these issues by calling clear_dirty() before calling cell_defer().
    Incoming bios for that block will then be detained in the cell and
    released only after clear_dirty() has completed, so the race will not
    occur.
    
    Found by inspecting the code after noticing spurious dirty counts
    (scenario B).
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAnssi Hannula <anssi.hannula@iki.fi>
    Acked-by: default avatarJoe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
    40aa978e
dm-cache-target.c 75.7 KB