linux-toradex.git/mm/fadvise.c, branch v3.4.43

mm/fadvise.c: drain all pagevecs if POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED fails to discard all pages

2013-02-28T14:59:01+00:00

commit 67d46b296a1ba1477c0df8ff3bc5e0167a0b0732 upstream.

Rob van der Heij reported the following (paraphrased) on private mail.

	The scenario is that I want to avoid backups to fill up the page
	cache and purge stuff that is more likely to be used again (this is
	with s390x Linux on z/VM, so I don't give it as much memory that
	we don't care anymore). So I have something with LD_PRELOAD that
	intercepts the close() call (from tar, in this case) and issues
	a posix_fadvise() just before closing the file.

	This mostly works, except for small files (less than 14 pages)
	that remains in page cache after the face.

Unfortunately Rob has not had a chance to test this exact patch but the
test program below should be reproducing the problem he described.

The issue is the per-cpu pagevecs for LRU additions.  If the pages are
added by one CPU but fadvise() is called on another then the pages
remain resident as the invalidate_mapping_pages() only drains the local
pagevecs via its call to pagevec_release().  The user-visible effect is
that a program that uses fadvise() properly is not obeyed.

A possible fix for this is to put the necessary smarts into
invalidate_mapping_pages() to globally drain the LRU pagevecs if a
pagevec page could not be discarded.  The downside with this is that an
inode cache shrink would send a global IPI and memory pressure
potentially causing global IPI storms is very undesirable.

Instead, this patch adds a check during fadvise(POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) to
check if invalidate_mapping_pages() discarded all the requested pages.
If a subset of pages are discarded it drains the LRU pagevecs and tries
again.  If the second attempt fails, it assumes it is due to the pages
being mapped, locked or dirty and does not care.  With this patch, an
application using fadvise() correctly will be obeyed but there is a
downside that a malicious application can force the kernel to send
global IPIs and increase overhead.

If accepted, I would like this to be considered as a -stable candidate.
It's not an urgent issue but it's a system call that is not working as
advertised which is weak.

The following test program demonstrates the problem.  It should never
report that pages are still resident but will without this patch.  It
assumes that CPU 0 and 1 exist.

int main() {
	int fd;
	int pagesize = getpagesize();
	ssize_t written = 0, expected;
	char *buf;
	unsigned char *vec;
	int resident, i;
	cpu_set_t set;

	/* Prepare a buffer for writing */
	expected = FILESIZE_PAGES * pagesize;
	buf = malloc(expected + 1);
	if (buf == NULL) {
		printf("ENOMEM\n");
		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	}
	buf[expected] = 0;
	memset(buf, 'a', expected);

	/* Prepare the mincore vec */
	vec = malloc(FILESIZE_PAGES);
	if (vec == NULL) {
		printf("ENOMEM\n");
		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	}

	/* Bind ourselves to CPU 0 */
	CPU_ZERO(&set);
	CPU_SET(0, &set);
	if (sched_setaffinity(getpid(), sizeof(set), &set) == -1) {
		perror("sched_setaffinity");
		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	}

	/* open file, unlink and write buffer */
	fd = open("fadvise-test-file", O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_RDWR);
	if (fd == -1) {
		perror("open");
		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	}
	unlink("fadvise-test-file");
	while (written < expected) {
		ssize_t this_write;
		this_write = write(fd, buf + written, expected - written);

		if (this_write == -1) {
			perror("write");
			exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
		}

		written += this_write;
	}
	free(buf);

	/*
	 * Force ourselves to another CPU. If fadvise only flushes the local
	 * CPUs pagevecs then the fadvise will fail to discard all file pages
	 */
	CPU_ZERO(&set);
	CPU_SET(1, &set);
	if (sched_setaffinity(getpid(), sizeof(set), &set) == -1) {
		perror("sched_setaffinity");
		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	}

	/* sync and fadvise to discard the page cache */
	fsync(fd);
	if (posix_fadvise(fd, 0, expected, POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) == -1) {
		perror("posix_fadvise");
		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	}

	/* map the file and use mincore to see which parts of it are resident */
	buf = mmap(NULL, expected, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, fd, 0);
	if (buf == NULL) {
		perror("mmap");
		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	}
	if (mincore(buf, expected, vec) == -1) {
		perror("mincore");
		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	}

	/* Check residency */
	for (i = 0, resident = 0; i < FILESIZE_PAGES; i++) {
		if (vec[i])
			resident++;
	}
	if (resident != 0) {
		printf("Nr unexpected pages resident: %d\n", resident);
		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	}

	munmap(buf, expected);
	close(fd);
	free(vec);
	exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Reported-by: Rob van der Heij 
Tested-by: Rob van der Heij 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

fadvise: only initiate writeback for specified range with FADV_DONTNEED

2012-01-11T00:30:43+00:00

Previously POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED would start writeback for the entire file
when the bdi was not write congested.  This negatively impacts performance
if the file contains dirty pages outside of the requested range.  This
change uses __filemap_fdatawrite_range() to only initiate writeback for
the requested range.

Signed-off-by: Shawn Bohrer 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

readahead: introduce FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM

2010-03-06T19:26:25+00:00

This fixes inefficient page-by-page reads on POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM used to set ra_pages=0, which leads to poor performance:
a 16K read will be carried out in 4 _sync_ 1-page reads.

In other places, ra_pages==0 means
- it's ramfs/tmpfs/hugetlbfs/sysfs/configfs
- some IO error happened
where multi-page read IO won't help or should be avoided.

POSIX_FADV_RANDOM actually want a different semantics: to disable the
*heuristic* readahead algorithm, and to use a dumb one which faithfully
submit read IO for whatever application requests.

So introduce a flag FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM.

Note that the random hint is not likely to help random reads performance
noticeably.  And it may be too permissive on huge request size (its IO
size is not limited by read_ahead_kb).

In Quentin's report (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/12/24/145), the overall
(NFS read) performance of the application increased by 313%!

Tested-by: Quentin Barnes 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang 
Cc: Nick Piggin 
Cc: Andi Kleen 
Cc: Steven Whitehouse 
Cc: David Howells 
Cc: Jonathan Corbet 
Cc: Al Viro 
Cc: Christoph Hellwig 
Cc: Trond Myklebust 
Cc: Chuck Lever 
Cc: 			[2.6.33.x]
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

readahead: move max_sane_readahead() calls into force_page_cache_readahead()

2009-06-17T02:47:28+00:00

Impact: code simplification.

Cc: Nick Piggin 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang 
Cc: Ying Han 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[CVE-2009-0029] System call wrapper special cases

2009-01-14T13:15:18+00:00

System calls with an unsigned long long argument can't be converted with
the standard wrappers since that would include a cast to long, which in
turn means that we would lose the upper 32 bit on 32 bit architectures.
Also semctl can't use the standard wrapper since it has a 'union'
parameter.

So we handle them as special case and add some extra wrappers instead.

Signed-off-by: Heiko Carstens

Remove Andrew Morton's old email accounts

2008-10-16T18:21:32+00:00

People can use the real name an an index into MAINTAINERS to find the
current email address.

Signed-off-by: Francois Cami 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

xip: support non-struct page backed memory

2008-04-28T15:58:23+00:00

Convert XIP to support non-struct page backed memory, using VM_MIXEDMAP for
the user mappings.

This requires the get_xip_page API to be changed to an address based one.
Improve the API layering a little bit too, while we're here.

This is required in order to support XIP filesystems on memory that isn't
backed with struct page (but memory with struct page is still supported too).

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin 
Acked-by: Carsten Otte 
Cc: Jared Hulbert 
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky 
Cc: Heiko Carstens 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

check ADVICE of fadvise64_64 even if get_xip_page is given

2008-02-05T17:44:19+00:00

I've written some test programs in ltp project.  During writing I met an
problem which I cannot solve in user land.  So I wrote a patch for linux
kernel.  Please, include this patch if acceptable.

The test program tests the 4th parameter of fadvise64_64:

    long sys_fadvise64_64(int fd, loff_t offset, loff_t len, int advice);

My test case calls fadvise64_64 with invalid advice value and checks errno is
set to EINVAL.  About the advice parameter man page says:

    ...
    Permissible values for advice include:

	   POSIX_FADV_NORMAL
                  ...
	   POSIX_FADV_SEQUENTIAL
                  ...
	   POSIX_FADV_RANDOM
		  ...
	   POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE
                  ...
	   POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED
                  ...
	   POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED
		  ...
    ERRORS
           ...
	   EINVAL An invalid value was specified for advice.

However, I got a bug report that the system call invocations
in my test case returned 0 unexpectedly.

I've inspected the kernel code:

    asmlinkage long sys_fadvise64_64(int fd, loff_t offset, loff_t len, int advice)
    {
	    struct file *file = fget(fd);
	    struct address_space *mapping;
	    struct backing_dev_info *bdi;
	    loff_t endbyte;			/* inclusive */
	    pgoff_t start_index;
	    pgoff_t end_index;
	    unsigned long nrpages;
	    int ret = 0;

	    if (!file)
		    return -EBADF;

	    if (S_ISFIFO(file->f_path.dentry->d_inode->i_mode)) {
		    ret = -ESPIPE;
		    goto out;
	    }

	    mapping = file->f_mapping;
	    if (!mapping || len < 0) {
		    ret = -EINVAL;
		    goto out;
	    }

	    if (mapping->a_ops->get_xip_page)
		    /* no bad return value, but ignore advice */
		    goto out;
    ...
    out:
	    fput(file);
	    return ret;
    }

I found the advice parameter is just ignored in the case
mapping->a_ops->get_xip_page is given. This behavior is different from
what is written on the man page. Is this o.k.?

get_xip_page is given if CONFIG_EXT2_FS_XIP is true.
Anyway I cannot find the easy way to detect get_xip_page
field is given or CONFIG_EXT2_FS_XIP is true from the
user space.

I propose the following patch which checks the advice parameter
even if get_xip_page is given.

Signed-off-by: Masatake YAMATO 
Acked-by: Carsten Otte 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] mm: change uses of f_{dentry,vfsmnt} to use f_path

2006-12-08T16:28:43+00:00

Change all the uses of f_{dentry,vfsmnt} to f_path.{dentry,mnt} in linux/mm/.

Signed-off-by: Josef "Jeff" Sipek 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] fadvise() make POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE a no-op

2006-08-06T15:57:47+00:00

The POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE hint means "the application will use this range of the
file a single time".  It seems to be intended that the implementation will use
this hint to perform drop-behind of that part of the file when the application
gets around to reading or writing it.

However for reasons which aren't obvious (or sane?) I mapped
POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE onto POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED.  ie: it does readahead.

That's daft.  So for now, make POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE a no-op.

This is a non-back-compatible change.  If someone was using POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE
to perform readahead, they lose.  The likelihood is low.

If/when we later implement POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE things will get interesting - to
do it fully we'll need to maintain file offset/length ranges and peform all
sorts of complex tricks, and managing the lifetime of those ranges' data
structures will be interesting..

A sensible implementation would probably ignore the file range and would
simply mark the entire file as needing some form of drop-behind treatment.

Cc: Michael Kerrisk 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds