On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 11:45:39AM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
quoted text
> On Fri, 9 Feb 2007 11:14:55 -0800 Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> 
> > If so, that might be preventable by leaving the buffer nonuptodate.
> 
> oh, OK, it was buffer_new(), so zeroes are the right thing for a reader to
> see.
> 
> But if it wasn't buffer_new() then the appropriate thing for the reader to
> see is what's on the disk.  But __block_prepare_write() won't read a buffer
> which is fully-inside the write area from disk.
> 
> And that's seemingly OK, because if a reader gets in there after the short
> copy, that reader will see the non-uptodate buffer and will populate it
> from disk.
> 
> But doing that will overwrite the data which the write() caller managed to
> copy into the page before it took a fault.  And that's not OK because
> block_perform_write() does iovec_iterator_advance(i, copied) in this case
> and hence will not rerun the copy after acquiring the page lock?

Hmm, yeah. This can be handled by not advancing partially into a !uptodate
buffer.
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