xfs: logging the on disk inode LSN can make it go backwards
When we log an inode, we format the "log inode" core and set an LSN in that inode core. We do that via xfs_inode_item_format_core(), which calls: xfs_inode_to_log_dinode(ip, dic, ip->i_itemp->ili_item.li_lsn); to format the log inode. It writes the LSN from the inode item into the log inode, and if recovery decides the inode item needs to be replayed, it recovers the log inode LSN field and writes it into the on disk inode LSN field. Now this might seem like a reasonable thing to do, but it is wrong on multiple levels. Firstly, if the item is not yet in the AIL, item->li_lsn is zero. i.e. the first time the inode it is logged and formatted, the LSN we write into the log inode will be zero. If we only log it once, recovery will run and can write this zero LSN into the inode. This means that the next time the inode is logged and log recovery runs, it will *always* replay changes to the inode regardless of whether the inode is newer on disk than the version in the log and that violates the entire purpose of recording the LSN in the inode at writeback time (i.e. to stop it going backwards in time on disk during recovery). Secondly, if we commit the CIL to the journal so the inode item moves to the AIL, and then relog the inode, the LSN that gets stamped into the log inode will be the LSN of the inode's current location in the AIL, not it's age on disk. And it's not the LSN that will be associated with the current change. That means when log recovery replays this inode item, the LSN that ends up on disk is the LSN for the previous changes in the log, not the current changes being replayed. IOWs, after recovery the LSN on disk is not in sync with the LSN of the modifications that were replayed into the inode. This, again, violates the recovery ordering semantics that on-disk writeback LSNs provide. Hence the inode LSN in the log dinode is -always- invalid. Thirdly, recovery actually has the LSN of the log transaction it is replaying right at hand - it uses it to determine if it should replay the inode by comparing it to the on-disk inode's LSN. But it doesn't use that LSN to stamp the LSN into the inode which will be written back when the transaction is fully replayed. It uses the one in the log dinode, which we know is always going to be incorrect. Looking back at the change history, the inode logging was broken by commit 93f958f9 ("xfs: cull unnecessary icdinode fields") way back in 2016 by a stupid idiot who thought he knew how this code worked. i.e. me. That commit replaced an in memory di_lsn field that was updated only at inode writeback time from the inode item.li_lsn value - and hence always contained the same LSN that appeared in the on-disk inode - with a read of the inode item LSN at inode format time. CLearly these are not the same thing. Before 93f958f9, the log recovery behaviour was irrelevant, because the LSN in the log inode always matched the on-disk LSN at the time the inode was logged, hence recovery of the transaction would never make the on-disk LSN in the inode go backwards or get out of sync. A symptom of the problem is this, caught from a failure of generic/482. Before log recovery, the inode has been allocated but never used: xfs_db> inode 393388 xfs_db> p core.magic = 0x494e core.mode = 0 .... v3.crc = 0x99126961 (correct) v3.change_count = 0 v3.lsn = 0 v3.flags2 = 0 v3.cowextsize = 0 v3.crtime.sec = Thu Jan 1 10:00:00 1970 v3.crtime.nsec = 0 After log recovery: xfs_db> p core.magic = 0x494e core.mode = 020444 .... v3.crc = 0x23e68f23 (correct) v3.change_count = 2 v3.lsn = 0 v3.flags2 = 0 v3.cowextsize = 0 v3.crtime.sec = Thu Jul 22 17:03:03 2021 v3.crtime.nsec = 751000000 ... You can see that the LSN of the on-disk inode is 0, even though it clearly has been written to disk. I point out this inode, because the generic/482 failure occurred because several adjacent inodes in this specific inode cluster were not replayed correctly and still appeared to be zero on disk when all the other metadata (inobt, finobt, directories, etc) indicated they should be allocated and written back. The fix for this is two-fold. The first is that we need to either revert the LSN changes in 93f958f9 or stop logging the inode LSN altogether. If we do the former, log recovery does not need to change but we add 8 bytes of memory per inode to store what is largely a write-only inode field. If we do the latter, log recovery needs to stamp the on-disk inode in the same manner that inode writeback does. I prefer the latter, because we shouldn't really be trying to log and replay changes to the on disk LSN as the on-disk value is the canonical source of the on-disk version of the inode. It also matches the way we recover buffer items - we create a buf_log_item that carries the current recovery transaction LSN that gets stamped into the buffer by the write verifier when it gets written back when the transaction is fully recovered. However, this might break log recovery on older kernels even more, so I'm going to simply ignore the logged value in recovery and stamp the on-disk inode with the LSN of the transaction being recovered that will trigger writeback on transaction recovery completion. This will ensure that the on-disk inode LSN always reflects the LSN of the last change that was written to disk, regardless of whether it comes from log recovery or runtime writeback. Fixes: 93f958f9 ("xfs: cull unnecessary icdinode fields") Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
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