On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

quoted text
> > O_DIRECT does not take a refcount on the page in order to prevent this?
>
> It definitely does, it's also the only thing it does.

Then page migration will not occur because there is an unresolved
reference.

quoted text
> The whole point is that O_DIRECT can start the instruction after
> page_count returns as far as I can tell.

But there must still be reference for the bio and whatever may be going on
at the time in order to perform the I/O operation.

quoted text
> If you check the three emails I linked in answer to Andrew on the
> topic, we agree the o_direct can't start under PT lock (or under
> mmap_sem in write mode but migrate.c rightefully takes the read
> mode). So the fix used in ksm page_wrprotect and in fork() is to check
> page_count vs page_mapcount inside PT lock before doing anything on
> the pte. If you just mark the page wprotect while O_DIRECT is in
> flight, that's enough for fork() to generate data corruption in the
> parent (not the child where the result would be undefined). But in the
> parent the result of the o-direct is defined and it'd never corrupt if
> this was a cached-I/O. The moment the parent pte is marked readonly, a thread
> in the parent could write to the last 512bytes of the page, leading to
> the first 512bytes coming with O_DIRECT from disk being lost (as the
> write will trigger a cow before I/O is complete and the dma will
> complete on the oldpage).

Have you actually seen corruption or this conjecture? AFACT the page
count is elevated while I/O is in progress and thus this is safe.

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