• Bjorn Steinbrink's avatar
    Fix dirty page accounting leak with ext3 data=journal · a2b34564
    Bjorn Steinbrink authored
    In 46d2277c ("Clean up and make
    try_to_free_buffers() not race with dirty pages"), try_to_free_buffers
    was changed to bail out if the page was dirty.
    
    That in turn caused truncate_complete_page to leak massive amounts of
    memory, because the dirty bit was only cleared after the call to
    try_to_free_buffers.
    
    So the call to cancel_dirty_page was moved up to have the dirty bit
    cleared early in 3e67c098 ("truncate:
    clear page dirtiness before running try_to_free_buffers()").
    
    The problem with that fix is, that the page can be redirtied after
    cancel_dirty_page was called, eg. like this:
    
    truncate_complete_page()
      cancel_dirty_page() // PG_dirty cleared, decr. dirty pages
      do_invalidatepage()
        ext3_invalidatepage()
          journal_invalidatepage()
            journal_unmap_buffer()
              __dispose_buffer()
                __journal_unfile_buffer()
                  __journal_temp_unlink_buffer()
                    mark_buffer_dirty(); // PG_dirty set, incr. dirty pages
    
    And then we end up with dirty pages being wrongly accounted.
    
    As a result, in ecdfc978 ("Resurrect
    'try_to_free_buffers()' VM hackery") the changes to try_to_free_buffers
    were reverted, so the original reason for the massive memory leak is
    gone, and we can also revert the move of the call to cancel_dirty_page
    from truncate_complete_page and get the accounting right again.
    
    I'm not sure if it matters, but opposed to the final check in
    __remove_from_page_cache, this one also cares about the task io
    accounting, so maybe we want to use this instead, although it's not
    quite the clean fix either.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarBjörn Steinbrink <B.Steinbrink@gmx.de>
    Tested-by: default avatarKrzysztof Piotr Oledzki <ole@ans.pl>
    Cc: Jan Kara <jack@ucw.cz>
    Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
    Cc: Thomas Osterried <osterried@jesse.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    a2b34564
truncate.c 12.9 KB