kernel/include/linux/fs.h, branch linux-2.6.13.y

Fix nasty ncpfs symlink handling bug.

2005-08-20T01:02:56Z

This bug could cause oopses and page state corruption, because ncpfs used the generic page-cache symlink handlign functions. But those functions only work if the page cache is guaranteed to be "stable", ie a page that was installed when the symlink walk was started has to still be installed in the page cache at the end of the walk. We could have fixed ncpfs to not use the generic helper routines, but it is in many ways much cleaner to instead improve on the symlink walking helper routines so that they don't require that absolute stability. We do this by allowing "follow_link()" to return a error-pointer as a cookie, which is fed back to the cleanup "put_link()" routine. This also simplifies NFS symlink handling. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] stale POSIX lock handling

2005-07-27T23:26:06Z

I believe that there is a problem with the handling of POSIX locks, which the attached patch should address. The problem appears to be a race between fcntl(2) and close(2). A multithreaded application could close a file descriptor at the same time as it is trying to acquire a lock using the same file descriptor. I would suggest that that multithreaded application is not providing the proper synchronization for itself, but the OS should still behave correctly. SUS3 (Single UNIX Specification Version 3, read: POSIX) indicates that when a file descriptor is closed, that all POSIX locks on the file, owned by the process which closed the file descriptor, should be released. The trick here is when those locks are released. The current code releases all locks which exist when close is processing, but any locks in progress are handled when the last reference to the open file is released. There are three cases to consider. One is the simple case, a multithreaded (mt) process has a file open and races to close it and acquire a lock on it. In this case, the close will release one reference to the open file and when the fcntl is done, it will release the other reference. For this situation, no locks should exist on the file when both the close and fcntl operations are done. The current system will handle this case because the last reference to the open file is being released. The second case is when the mt process has dup(2)'d the file descriptor. The close will release one reference to the file and the fcntl, when done, will release another, but there will still be at least one more reference to the open file. One could argue that the existence of a lock on the file after the close has completed is okay, because it was acquired after the close operation and there is still a way for the application to release the lock on the file, using an existing file descriptor. The third case is when the mt process has forked, after opening the file and either before or after becoming an mt process. In this case, each process would hold a reference to the open file. For each process, this degenerates to first case above. However, the lock continues to exist until both processes have released their references to the open file. This lock could block other lock requests. The changes to release the lock when the last reference to the open file aren't quite right because they would allow the lock to exist as long as there was a reference to the open file. This is too long. The new proposed solution is to add support in the fcntl code path to detect a race with close and then to release the lock which was just acquired when such as race is detected. This causes locks to be released in a timely fashion and for the system to conform to the POSIX semantic specification. This was tested by instrumenting a kernel to detect the handling locks and then running a program which generates case #3 above. A dangling lock could be reliably generated. When the changes to detect the close/fcntl race were added, a dangling lock could no longer be generated. Cc: Matthew Wilcox Cc: Trond Myklebust Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Fix soft lockup due to NTFS: VFS part and explanation

2005-07-13T18:25:24Z

Something has changed in the core kernel such that we now get concurrent inode write outs, one e.g via pdflush and one via sys_sync or whatever. This causes a nasty deadlock in ntfs. The only clean solution unfortunately requires a minor vfs api extension. First the deadlock analysis: Prerequisive knowledge: NTFS has a file $MFT (inode 0) loaded at mount time. The NTFS driver uses the page cache for storing the file contents as usual. More interestingly this file contains the table of on-disk inodes as a sequence of MFT_RECORDs. Thus NTFS driver accesses the on-disk inodes by accessing the MFT_RECORDs in the page cache pages of the loaded inode $MFT. The situation: VFS inode X on a mounted ntfs volume is dirty. For same inode X, the ntfs_inode is dirty and thus corresponding on-disk inode, which is as explained above in a dirty PAGE_CACHE_PAGE belonging to the table of inodes ($MFT, inode 0). What happens: Process 1: sys_sync()/umount()/whatever... calls __sync_single_inode() for $MFT -> do_writepages() -> write_page for the dirty page containing the on-disk inode X, the page is now locked -> ntfs_write_mst_block() which clears PageUptodate() on the page to prevent anyone else getting hold of it whilst it does the write out (this is necessary as the on-disk inode needs "fixups" applied before the write to disk which are removed again after the write and PageUptodate is then set again). It then analyses the page looking for dirty on-disk inodes and when it finds one it calls ntfs_may_write_mft_record() to see if it is safe to write this on-disk inode. This then calls ilookup5() to check if the corresponding VFS inode is in icache(). This in turn calls ifind() which waits on the inode lock via wait_on_inode whilst holding the global inode_lock. Process 2: pdflush results in a call to __sync_single_inode for the same VFS inode X on the ntfs volume. This locks the inode (I_LOCK) then calls write-inode -> ntfs_write_inode -> map_mft_record() -> read_cache_page() of the page (in page cache of table of inodes $MFT, inode 0) containing the on-disk inode. This page has PageUptodate() clear because of Process 1 (see above) so read_cache_page() blocks when tries to take the page lock for the page so it can call ntfs_read_page(). Thus Process 1 is holding the page lock on the page containing the on-disk inode X and it is waiting on the inode X to be unlocked in ifind() so it can write the page out and then unlock the page. And Process 2 is holding the inode lock on inode X and is waiting for the page to be unlocked so it can call ntfs_readpage() or discover that Process 1 set PageUptodate() again and use the page. Thus we have a deadlock due to ifind() waiting on the inode lock. The only sensible solution: NTFS does not care whether the VFS inode is locked or not when it calls ilookup5() (it doesn't use the VFS inode at all, it just uses it to find the corresponding ntfs_inode which is of course attached to the VFS inode (both are one single struct); and it uses the ntfs_inode which is subject to its own locking so I_LOCK is irrelevant) hence we want a modified ilookup5_nowait() which is the same as ilookup5() but it does not wait on the inode lock. Without such functionality I would have to keep my own ntfs_inode cache in the NTFS driver just so I can find ntfs_inodes independent of their VFS inodes which would be slow, memory and cpu cycle wasting, and incredibly stupid given the icache already exists in the VFS. Below is a patch that does the ilookup5_nowait() implementation in fs/inode.c and exports it. ilookup5_nowait.diff: Introduce ilookup5_nowait() which is basically the same as ilookup5() but it does not wait on the inode's lock (i.e. it omits the wait_on_inode() done in ifind()). This is needed to avoid a nasty deadlock in NTFS. Signed-off-by: Anton Altaparmakov Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] inotify

2005-07-13T03:38:38Z

inotify is intended to correct the deficiencies of dnotify, particularly its inability to scale and its terrible user interface: * dnotify requires the opening of one fd per each directory that you intend to watch. This quickly results in too many open files and pins removable media, preventing unmount. * dnotify is directory-based. You only learn about changes to directories. Sure, a change to a file in a directory affects the directory, but you are then forced to keep a cache of stat structures. * dnotify's interface to user-space is awful. Signals? inotify provides a more usable, simple, powerful solution to file change notification: * inotify's interface is a system call that returns a fd, not SIGIO. You get a single fd, which is select()-able. * inotify has an event that says "the filesystem that the item you were watching is on was unmounted." * inotify can watch directories or files. Inotify is currently used by Beagle (a desktop search infrastructure), Gamin (a FAM replacement), and other projects. See Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt. Signed-off-by: Robert Love Cc: John McCutchan Cc: Christoph Hellwig Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] export generic_drop_inode() to modules

2005-07-08T01:23:35Z

OCFS2 wants to mark an inode which has been orphaned by another node so that during final iput it takes the correct path through the VFS and can pass through the OCFS2 delete_inode callback. Since i_nlink can get out of date with other nodes, the best way I see to accomplish this is by clearing i_nlink on those inodes at drop_inode time. Other than this small amount of work, nothing different needs to happen, so I think it would be cleanest to be able to just call generic_drop_inode at the end of the OCFS2 drop_inode callback. Signed-off-by: Mark Fasheh Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Update cfq io scheduler to time sliced design

2005-06-27T21:33:29Z

This updates the CFQ io scheduler to the new time sliced design (cfq v3). It provides full process fairness, while giving excellent aggregate system throughput even for many competing processes. It supports io priorities, either inherited from the cpu nice value or set directly with the ioprio_get/set syscalls. The latter closely mimic set/getpriority. This import is based on my latest from -mm. Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] xip: reduce code duplication

2005-06-24T07:06:41Z

This patch reworks filemap_xip.c with the goal to reduce code duplication from mm/filemap.c. It applies agains 2.6.12-rc6-mm1. Instead of implementing the aio functions, this one implements the synchronous read/write functions only. For readv and writev, the generic fallback is used. For aio, we rely on the application doing the fallback. Since our "synchronous" function does memcpy immediately anyway, there is no performance difference between using the fallbacks or implementing each operation. Signed-off-by: Carsten Otte Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] xip: ext2: execute in place

2005-06-24T07:06:41Z

These are the ext2 related parts. Ext2 now uses the xip_* file operations along with the get_xip_page aop when mounted with -o xip. Signed-off-by: Carsten Otte Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] xip: fs/mm: execute in place

2005-06-24T07:06:41Z

- generic_file* file operations do no longer have a xip/non-xip split - filemap_xip.c implements a new set of fops that require get_xip_page aop to work proper. all new fops are exported GPL-only (don't like to see whatever code use those except GPL modules) - __xip_unmap now uses page_check_address, which is no longer static in rmap.c, and defined in linux/rmap.h - mm/filemap.h is now much more clean, plainly having just Linus' inline funcs moved here from filemap.c - fix includes in filemap_xip to make it build cleanly on i386 Signed-off-by: Carsten Otte Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] xip: bdev: execute in place

2005-06-24T07:06:41Z

This is the block device related part. The block device operation direct_access now has a struct block_device as first parameter. Signed-off-by: Carsten Otte Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds