From: Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
To: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Ext4 <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>, rebello.anthony@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Data exposure on IO error
Date: Sat, 1 Aug 2020 10:32:53 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAOQ4uxgovoBjs5BnYdPyV6K9AP17fCaeVgZ=wQMfx4hAuAf5RQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200731225621.GA7126@quack2.suse.cz>
On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 1:59 AM Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> wrote:
>
> Hello!
>
> In bug 207729, Anthony reported a bug that can actually lead to a stale
> data exposure on IO error. The problem is relatively simple: Suppose we
> do:
>
> fd = open("file", O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_TRUNC, 0644);
> write(fd, buf, 4096);
> fsync(fd);
>
> And IO error happens when fsync writes the block of "file". The IO error
> gets properly reported to userspace but otherwise the filesystem keeps
> running. So the transaction creating "file" and allocating block to it can
> commit. Then when page cache of "file" gets evicted, the user can read
> stale block contents (provided the IO error was just temporary or involving
> only writes).
>
> Now I understand in face of IO errors the behavior is really undefined but
> potential exposure of stale data seems worse than strictly necessary. Also
> if we run in data=ordered mode, especially if also data_err=abort is set,
> user would rightfully expect that the filesystem gets aborted when such IO
> error happens but that's not the case. Generally data_err=abort seems a bit
> misnamed (and the manpage is wrong about this mount option) since what it
> really does is that if jbd2 thread encounters error when writing back
> ordered data, the filesystem is aborted. However the ordered data can be
> written back by other processes as well and in that case the error is just
> lost / reported to userspace but the filesystem doesn't get aborted.
>
> As I was thinking about it, it seems to me that in data=ordered mode, we
> should just always abort the filesystem when writeback of newly allocated
> block fails to avoid the stale data exposure mentioned above. And then, we
> could just deprecate data_err= mount option because it wouldn't be any
> useful anymore... What do people think?
>
It sounds worse than strictly necessary.
In what way is that use case different from writing into a punched hole
in the middle of the file and getting an IO error on writeback?
It looks like ext4 already goes into a great deal of trouble to handle
extent conversion to init at io end.
So couldn't the described case be handled as a private case of
filling a hole at the end of the file?
Am I missing something beyond the fact that traditionally, extending
a file enjoyed the protection of i_disksize, so did not need to worry
about unwritten extents?
Thanks,
Amir.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-08-01 7:33 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-07-31 22:56 Data exposure on IO error Jan Kara
2020-08-01 7:32 ` Amir Goldstein [this message]
2020-08-03 7:57 ` Jan Kara
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to='CAOQ4uxgovoBjs5BnYdPyV6K9AP17fCaeVgZ=wQMfx4hAuAf5RQ@mail.gmail.com' \
--to=amir73il@gmail.com \
--cc=jack@suse.cz \
--cc=linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org \
--cc=rebello.anthony@gmail.com \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).