On s390 any write to a page (even from kernel itself) sets architecture
specific page dirty bit. Thus when a page is written to via buffered
write, HW dirty bit gets set and when we later map and unmap the page,
page_remove_rmap() finds the dirty bit and calls set_page_dirty().
Dirtying of a page which shouldn't be dirty can cause all sorts of
problems to filesystems. The bug we observed in practice is that
buffers from the page get freed, so when the page gets later marked as
dirty and writeback writes it, XFS crashes due to an assertion
BUG_ON(!PagePrivate(page)) in page_buffers() called from
xfs_count_page_state().
Similar problem can also happen when zero_user_segment() call from
xfs_vm_writepage() (or block_write_full_page() for that matter) set the
hardware dirty bit during writeback, later buffers get freed, and then
page unmapped.
Fix the issue by ignoring s390 HW dirty bit for page cache pages of
mappings with mapping_cap_account_dirty(). This is safe because for
such mappings when a page gets marked as writeable in PTE it is also
marked dirty in do_wp_page() or do_page_fault(). When the dirty bit is
cleared by clear_page_dirty_for_io(), the page gets writeprotected in
page_mkclean(). So pagecache page is writeable if and only if it is
dirty.
Thanks to Hugh Dickins for pointing out mapping has to have
mapping_cap_account_dirty() for things to work and proposing a cleaned
up variant of the patch.
The patch has survived about two hours of running fsx-linux on tmpfs
while heavily swapping and several days of running on out build machines
where the original problem was triggered.
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> [3.0+]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
ef5d437f71