Re: [RESEND PATCH v5 1/4] zram: Fix deadlock bug in partial write

[Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>]

On 01/28/2013 02:26 PM, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com> wrote:
>> On 01/28/2013 08:16 AM, Pekka Enberg wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 2:38 AM, Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> wrote:
>>>> Now zram allocates new page with GFP_KERNEL in zram I/O path
>>>> if IO is partial. Unfortunately, It may cuase deadlock with
>>>
>>> s/cuase/cause/g
>>>
>>>> reclaim path so this patch solves the problem.
>>>
>>> It'd be nice to know about the problem in more detail. I'm also
>>> curious on why you decided on GFP_ATOMIC for the read path and
>>> GFP_NOIO in the write path.
>>
>> This is because we're holding a kmap_atomic page in the read path.
> 
> Okay, so that's about partial *reads* and not even mentioned in the
> changelog, no?
> 
> AFAICT, you could rearrange the code in zram_bvec_read() as follows:
> 
>         if (is_partial_io(bvec))
>                 /* Use  a temporary buffer to decompress the page */
>                 uncmem = kmalloc(PAGE_SIZE, GFP_KERNEL);
>         else {
>                 uncmem = user_mem = kmap_atomic(page);
>         }
> 
> and avoid the GFP_ATOMIC allocation.
> 

user_mem still has to be mapped in case of partial I/O too. But the
temporary buffer allocation could happen before. The allocation still
would need to be GFP_NOIO to avoid possible deadlocks.

Anyhow, the commit message could definitely be more explicit.

Regards,
Jerome