linux.git/mm/filemap.c, branch v2.6.18

[PATCH] MM: Remove rogue readahead printk

2006-07-30T03:59:55+00:00

For some reason it triggers always with NFS root and spams the kernel
logs of my nfs root boxes a lot.

Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen 
Acked-by: Trond Myklebust 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/bunk/trivial

2006-06-30T22:39:30+00:00

* git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/bunk/trivial:
  Remove obsolete #include 
  remove obsolete swsusp_encrypt
  arch/arm26/Kconfig typos
  Documentation/IPMI typos
  Kconfig: Typos in net/sched/Kconfig
  v9fs: do not include linux/version.h
  Documentation/DocBook/mtdnand.tmpl: typo fixes
  typo fixes: specfic -> specific
  typo fixes in Documentation/networking/pktgen.txt
  typo fixes: occuring -> occurring
  typo fixes: infomation -> information
  typo fixes: disadvantadge -> disadvantage
  typo fixes: aquire -> acquire
  typo fixes: mecanism -> mechanism
  typo fixes: bandwith -> bandwidth
  fix a typo in the RTC_CLASS help text
  smb is no longer maintained

Manually merged trivial conflict in arch/um/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S

[PATCH] Light weight event counters

2006-06-30T18:25:36+00:00

The remaining counters in page_state after the zoned VM counter patches
have been applied are all just for show in /proc/vmstat.  They have no
essential function for the VM.

We use a simple increment of per cpu variables.  In order to avoid the most
severe races we disable preempt.  Preempt does not prevent the race between
an increment and an interrupt handler incrementing the same statistics
counter.  However, that race is exceedingly rare, we may only loose one
increment or so and there is no requirement (at least not in kernel) that
the vm event counters have to be accurate.

In the non preempt case this results in a simple increment for each
counter.  For many architectures this will be reduced by the compiler to a
single instruction.  This single instruction is atomic for i386 and x86_64.
 And therefore even the rare race condition in an interrupt is avoided for
both architectures in most cases.

The patchset also adds an off switch for embedded systems that allows a
building of linux kernels without these counters.

The implementation of these counters is through inline code that hopefully
results in only a single instruction increment instruction being emitted
(i386, x86_64) or in the increment being hidden though instruction
concurrency (EPIC architectures such as ia64 can get that done).

Benefits:
- VM event counter operations usually reduce to a single inline instruction
  on i386 and x86_64.
- No interrupt disable, only preempt disable for the preempt case.
  Preempt disable can also be avoided by moving the counter into a spinlock.
- Handling is similar to zoned VM counters.
- Simple and easily extendable.
- Can be omitted to reduce memory use for embedded use.

References:

RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113512330605497&w=2
RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114988082814934&w=2
local_t http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114991748606690&w=2
V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115014808400007&r=1&w=2
V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767022346&w=2
V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115047968808926&w=2

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] zoned vm counters: conversion of nr_pagecache to per zone counter

2006-06-30T18:25:34+00:00

Currently a single atomic variable is used to establish the size of the page
cache in the whole machine.  The zoned VM counters have the same method of
implementation as the nr_pagecache code but also allow the determination of
the pagecache size per zone.

Remove the special implementation for nr_pagecache and make it a zoned counter
named NR_FILE_PAGES.

Updates of the page cache counters are always performed with interrupts off.
We can therefore use the __ variant here.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Trond Myklebust 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Remove obsolete #include

2006-06-30T17:25:36+00:00

Signed-off-by: Jörn Engel 
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk

[PATCH] generic_file_buffered_write(): handle zero-length iovec segments

2006-06-29T17:26:20+00:00

The recent generic_file_write() deadlock fix caused
generic_file_buffered_write() to loop inifinitely when presented with a
zero-length iovec segment.  Fix.

Note that this fix deliberately avoids calling ->prepare_write(),
->commit_write() etc with a zero-length write.  This is because I don't trust
all filesystems to get that right.

This is a cautious approach, for 2.6.17.x.  For 2.6.18 we should just go ahead
and call ->prepare_write() and ->commit_write() with the zero length and fix
any broken filesystems.  So I'll make that change once this code is stabilised
and backported into 2.6.17.x.

The reason for preferring to call ->prepare_write() and ->commit_write() with
the zero-length segment: a zero-length segment _should_ be sufficiently
uncommon that this is the correct way of handling it.  We don't want to
optimise for poorly-written userspace at the expense of well-written
userspace.

Cc: "Vladimir V. Saveliev" 
Cc: Neil Brown 
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky 
Cc: Chris Wright 
Cc: Greg KH 
Cc: 
Cc: walt 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] mark address_space_operations const

2006-06-28T21:59:04+00:00

Same as with already do with the file operations: keep them in .rodata and
prevents people from doing runtime patching.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Cc: Steven French 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] generic_file_buffered_write(): deadlock on vectored write

2006-06-28T00:32:39+00:00

generic_file_buffered_write() prefaults in user pages in order to avoid
deadlock on copying from the same page as write goes to.

However, it looks like there is a problem when write is vectored:
fault_in_pages_readable brings in current segment or its part (maxlen).
OTOH, filemap_copy_from_user_iovec is called to copy number of bytes
(bytes) which may exceed current segment, so filemap_copy_from_user_iovec
switches to the next segment which is not brought in yet.  Pagefault is
generated.  That causes the deadlock if pagefault is for the same page
write goes to: page being written is locked and not uptodate, pagefault
will deadlock trying to lock locked page.

[akpm@osdl.org: somewhat rewritten]
Cc: Neil Brown 
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] readahead: backoff on I/O error

2006-06-25T17:01:17+00:00

Backoff readahead size exponentially on I/O error.

Michael Tokarev  described the problem as:

[QUOTE]
Suppose there's a CD-rom with a scratch/etc, one sector is unreadable.
In order to "fix" it, one have to read it and write to another CD-rom,
or something.. or just ignore the error (if it's just a skip in a video
stream).  Let's assume the unreadable block is number U.

But current behavior is just insane.  An application requests block
number N, which is before U. Kernel tries to read-ahead blocks N..U.
Cdrom drive tries to read it, re-read it.. for some time.  Finally,
when all the N..U-1 blocks are read, kernel returns block number N
(as requested) to an application, successefully.

Now an app requests block number N+1, and kernel tries to read
blocks N+1..U+1.  Retrying again as in previous step.

And so on, up to when an app requests block number U-1.  And when,
finally, it requests block U, it receives read error.

So, kernel currentry tries to re-read the same failing block as
many times as the current readahead value (256 (times?) by default).

This whole process already killed my cdrom drive (I posted about it
to LKML several months ago) - literally, the drive has fried, and
does not work anymore.  Ofcourse that problem was a bug in firmware
(or whatever) of the drive *too*, but.. main problem with that is
current readahead logic as described above.
[/QUOTE]

Which was confirmed by Jens Axboe :

[QUOTE]
For ide-cd, it tends do only end the first part of the request on a
medium error. So you may see a lot of repeats :/
[/QUOTE]

With this patch, retries are expected to be reduced from, say, 256, to 5.

[akpm@osdl.org: cleanups]
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Prepare for __copy_from_user_inatomic to not zero missed bytes

2006-06-25T17:01:09+00:00

The problem is that when we write to a file, the copy from userspace to
pagecache is first done with preemption disabled, so if the source address is
not immediately available the copy fails *and* *zeros* *the* *destination*.

This is a problem because a concurrent read (which admittedly is an odd thing
to do) might see zeros rather that was there before the write, or what was
there after, or some mixture of the two (any of these being a reasonable thing
to see).

If the copy did fail, it will immediately be retried with preemption
re-enabled so any transient problem with accessing the source won't cause an
error.

The first copying does not need to zero any uncopied bytes, and doing so
causes the problem.  It uses copy_from_user_atomic rather than copy_from_user
so the simple expedient is to change copy_from_user_atomic to *not* zero out
bytes on failure.

The first of these two patches prepares for the change by fixing two places
which assume copy_from_user_atomic does zero the tail.  The two usages are
very similar pieces of code which copy from a userspace iovec into one or more
page-cache pages.  These are changed to remove the assumption.

The second patch changes __copy_from_user_inatomic* to not zero the tail.
Once these are accepted, I will look at similar patches of other architectures
where this is important (ppc, mips and sparc being the ones I can find).

This patch:

There is a problem with __copy_from_user_inatomic zeroing the tail of the
buffer in the case of an error.  As it is called in atomic context, the error
may be transient, so it results in zeros being written where maybe they
shouldn't be.

In the usage in filemap, this opens a window for a well timed read to see data
(zeros) which is not consistent with any ordering of reads and writes.

Most cases where __copy_from_user_inatomic is called, a failure results in
__copy_from_user being called immediately.  As long as the latter zeros the
tail, the former doesn't need to.  However in *copy_from_user_iovec
implementations (in both filemap and ntfs/file), it is assumed that
copy_from_user_inatomic will zero the tail.

This patch removes that assumption, so that after this patch it will
be safe for copy_from_user_inatomic to not zero the tail.

This patch also adds some commentary to filemap.h and asm-i386/uaccess.h.

After this patch, all architectures that might disable preempt when
kmap_atomic is called need to have their __copy_from_user_inatomic* "fixed".
This includes
 - powerpc
 - i386
 - mips
 - sparc

Signed-off-by: Neil Brown 
Cc: David Howells 
Cc: Anton Altaparmakov 
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt 
Cc: Paul Mackerras 
Cc: Ralf Baechle 
Cc: William Lee Irwin III 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds