tree 686aac685a4c04f085dc17cc1a05910149a04933
parent b409f9fcf04692c0f603d28c73d2e3dfed27bf54
author Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> 1202192935 -0800
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org> 1202233456 -0800

tmpfs: fix shmem_swaplist races

Intensive swapoff testing shows shmem_unuse spinning on an entry in
shmem_swaplist pointing to itself: how does that come about?  Days pass...

First guess is this: shmem_delete_inode tests list_empty without taking the
global mutex (so the swapping case doesn't slow down the common case); but
there's an instant in shmem_unuse_inode's list_move_tail when the list entry
may appear empty (a rare case, because it's actually moving the head not the
the list member).  So there's a danger of leaving the inode on the swaplist
when it's freed, then reinitialized to point to itself when reused.  Fix that
by skipping the list_move_tail when it's a no-op, which happens to plug this.

But this same spinning then surfaces on another machine.  Ah, I'd never
suspected it, but shmem_writepage's swaplist manipulation is unsafe: though we
still hold page lock, which would hold off inode deletion if the page were in
pagecache, it doesn't hold off once it's in swapcache (free_swap_and_cache
doesn't wait on locked pages).  Hmm: we could put the the inode on swaplist
earlier, but then shmem_unuse_inode could never prune unswapped inodes.

Fix this with an igrab before dropping info->lock, as in shmem_unuse_inode;
though I am a little uneasy about the iput which has to follow - it works, and
I see nothing wrong with it, but it is surprising that shmem inode deletion
may now occur below shmem_writepage.  Revisit this fix later?

And while we're looking at these races: the way shmem_unuse tests swapped
without holding info->lock looks unsafe, if we've more than one swap area: a
racing shmem_writepage on another page of the same inode could be putting it
in swapcache, just as we're deciding to remove the inode from swaplist -
there's a danger of going on swap without being listed, so a later swapoff
would hang, being unable to locate the entry.  Move that test and removal down
into shmem_unuse_inode, once info->lock is held.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>