Re: [PATCH 2/2] dax: fix data corruption due to stale mmap reads

[Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 12:26 AM, Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> wrote:
> On Wed 26-04-17 16:52:36, Ross Zwisler wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 10:52:35AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
>> > On Tue 25-04-17 16:59:36, Ross Zwisler wrote:
>> > > On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 01:10:43PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
>> > > <>
>> > > > Hum, but now thinking more about it I have hard time figuring out why write
>> > > > vs fault cannot actually still race:
>> > > >
>> > > > CPU1 - write(2)                         CPU2 - read fault
>> > > >
>> > > >                                         dax_iomap_pte_fault()
>> > > >                                           ->iomap_begin() - sees hole
>> > > > dax_iomap_rw()
>> > > >   iomap_apply()
>> > > >     ->iomap_begin - allocates blocks
>> > > >     dax_iomap_actor()
>> > > >       invalidate_inode_pages2_range()
>> > > >         - there's nothing to invalidate
>> > > >                                           grab_mapping_entry()
>> > > >                                           - we add zero page in the radix
>> > > >                                             tree & map it to page tables
>> > > >
>> > > > Similarly read vs write fault may end up racing in a wrong way and try to
>> > > > replace already existing exceptional entry with a hole page?
>> > >
>> > > Yep, this race seems real to me, too.  This seems very much like the issues
>> > > that exist when a thread is doing direct I/O.  One thread is doing I/O to an
>> > > intermediate buffer (page cache for direct I/O case, zero page for us), and
>> > > the other is going around it directly to media, and they can get out of sync.
>> > >
>> > > IIRC the direct I/O code looked something like:
>> > >
>> > > 1/ invalidate existing mappings
>> > > 2/ do direct I/O to media
>> > > 3/ invalidate mappings again, just in case.  Should be cheap if there weren't
>> > >    any conflicting faults.  This makes sure any new allocations we made are
>> > >    faulted in.
>> >
>> > Yeah, the problem is people generally expect weird behavior when they mix
>> > direct and buffered IO (or let alone mmap) however everyone expects
>> > standard read(2) and write(2) to be completely coherent with mmap(2).
>>
>> Yep, fair enough.
>>
>> > > I guess one option would be to replicate that logic in the DAX I/O path, or we
>> > > could try and enhance our locking so page faults can't race with I/O since
>> > > both can allocate blocks.
>> >
>> > In the abstract way, the problem is that we have radix tree (and page
>> > tables) cache block mapping information and the operation: "read block
>> > mapping information, store it in the radix tree" is not serialized in any
>> > way against other block allocations so the information we store can be out
>> > of date by the time we store it.
>> >
>> > One way to solve this would be to move ->iomap_begin call in the fault
>> > paths under entry lock although that would mean I have to redo how ext4
>> > handles DAX faults because with current code it would create lock inversion
>> > wrt transaction start.
>>
>> I don't think this alone is enough to save us.  The I/O path doesn't currently
>> take any DAX radix tree entry locks, so our race would just become:
>>
>> CPU1 - write(2)                               CPU2 - read fault
>>
>>                                       dax_iomap_pte_fault()
>>                                         grab_mapping_entry() // newly moved
>>                                         ->iomap_begin() - sees hole
>> dax_iomap_rw()
>>   iomap_apply()
>>     ->iomap_begin - allocates blocks
>>     dax_iomap_actor()
>>       invalidate_inode_pages2_range()
>>         - there's nothing to invalidate
>>                                         - we add zero page in the radix
>>                                           tree & map it to page tables
>>
>> In their current form I don't think we want to take DAX radix tree entry locks
>> in the I/O path because that would effectively serialize I/O over a given
>> radix tree entry. For a 2MiB entry, for example, all I/O to that 2MiB range
>> would be serialized.
>
> Note that invalidate_inode_pages2_range() will see the entry created by
> grab_mapping_entry() on CPU2 and block waiting for its lock and this is
> exactly what stops the race. The invalidate_inode_pages2_range()
> effectively makes sure there isn't any page fault in progress for given
> range...
>
> Also note that writes to a file are serialized by i_rwsem anyway (and at
> least serialization of writes to the overlapping range is required by POSIX)
> so this doesn't add any more serialization than we already have.
>
>> > Another solution would be to grab i_mmap_sem for write when doing write
>> > fault of a page and similarly have it grabbed for writing when doing
>> > write(2). This would scale rather poorly but if we later replaced it with a
>> > range lock (Davidlohr has already posted a nice implementation of it) it
>> > won't be as bad. But I guess option 1) is better...
>>
>> The best idea I had for handling this sounds similar, which would be to
>> convert the radix tree locks to essentially be reader/writer locks.  I/O and
>> faults that don't modify the block mapping could just take read-level locks,
>> and could all run concurrently.  I/O or faults that modify a block mapping
>> would take a write lock, and serialize with other writers and readers.
>
> Well, this would be difficult to implement inside the radix tree (not
> enough bits in the entry) so you'd have to go for some external locking
> primitive anyway. And if you do that, read-write range lock Davidlohr has
> implemented is what you describe - well we could also have a radix tree
> with rwsems but I suspect the overhead of maintaining that would be too
> large. It would require larger rewrite than reusing entry locks as I
> suggest above though and it isn't an obvious performance win for realistic
> workloads either so I'd like to see some performance numbers before going
> that way. It likely improves a situation where processes race to fault the
> same page for which we already know the block mapping but I'm not sure if
> that translates to any measurable performance wins for workloads on DAX
> filesystem.

I'm also concerned about inventing new / fancy radix infrastructure
when we're already in the space of needing struct page for any
non-trivial usage of dax. As Kirill's transparent-huge-page page cache
implementation matures I'd be interested in looking at a transition
path away from radix locking towards something that it shared with the
common case page cache locking.
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