On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 07:29:31PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> Currently, serializing operations such as page fault, read, or readahead
> against hole punching is rather difficult. The basic race scheme is
> like:
> 
> fallocate(FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE)                       read / fault / ..
>   truncate_inode_pages_range()
>                                                 <create pages in page
>                                                  cache here>
>   <update fs block mapping and free blocks>
> 
> Now the problem is in this way read / page fault / readahead can
> instantiate pages in page cache with potentially stale data (if blocks
> get quickly reused). Avoiding this race is not simple - page locks do
> not work because we want to make sure there are *no* pages in given
> range.

One of the things I've had in mind for a while is moving the DAX locked
entry concept into the page cache proper.  It would avoid creating the
new semaphore, at the cost of taking the i_pages lock twice (once to
insert the entries that cover the range, and once to delete the entries).

It'd have pretty much the same effect, though -- read/fault/... would
block until the entry was deleted from the page cache.


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