Hi,
While looking at a bug related to direct IO returns to EIO, after
looking at the code, I found there is a window that
try_to_free_buffers() from direct IO could race with JBD, which holds
the reference to the data buffers before journal_commit_transaction()
ensures the data buffers has reached to the disk.
A little more detail: to prepare for direct IO, generic_file_direct_IO()
calls invalidate_inode_pages2_range() to invalidate the pages in the
cache before performaning direct IO. invalidate_inode_pages2_range()
tries to free the buffers via try_to free_buffers(), but sometimes it
can't, due to the buffers is possible still on some transaction's
t_sync_datalist or t_locked_list waiting for
journal_commit_transaction() to process it.
Currently Direct IO simply returns EIO if try_to_free_buffers() finds
the buffer is busy, as it has no clue that JBD is referencing it.
Is this a known issue and expected behavior? Any thoughts?
Mingming
--
