dm transaction manager: fix corruption due to non-atomic transaction commit

The persistent-data library used by dm-thin, dm-cache, etc is
transactional.  If anything goes wrong, such as an io error when writing
new metadata or a power failure, then we roll back to the last
transaction.

Atomicity when committing a transaction is achieved by:

a) Never overwriting data from the previous transaction.
b) Writing the superblock last, after all other metadata has hit the
   disk.

This commit and the following commit ("dm: take care to copy the space
map roots before locking the superblock") fix a bug associated with (b).
When committing it was possible for the superblock to still be written
in spite of an io error occurring during the preceeding metadata flush.
With these commits we're careful not to take the write lock out on the
superblock until after the metadata flush has completed.

Change the transaction manager's semantics for dm_tm_commit() to assume
all data has been flushed _before_ the single superblock that is passed
in.

As a prerequisite, split the block manager's block unlocking and
flushing by simplifying dm_bm_flush_and_unlock() to dm_bm_flush().  Now
the unlocking must be done separately.

This issue was discovered by forcing io errors at the crucial time
using dm-flakey.

Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 9 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/md/persistent-data/dm-transaction-manager.h b/drivers/md/persistent-data/dm-transaction-manager.h
index b5b139076ca5..2772ed2a781a 100644
--- a/drivers/md/persistent-data/dm-transaction-manager.h
+++ b/drivers/md/persistent-data/dm-transaction-manager.h
@@ -38,18 +38,17 @@ struct dm_transaction_manager *dm_tm_create_non_blocking_clone(struct dm_transac
 /*
  * We use a 2-phase commit here.
  *
- * i) In the first phase the block manager is told to start flushing, and
- * the changes to the space map are written to disk.  You should interrogate
- * your particular space map to get detail of its root node etc. to be
- * included in your superblock.
+ * i) Make all changes for the transaction *except* for the superblock.
+ * Then call dm_tm_pre_commit() to flush them to disk.
  *
- * ii) @root will be committed last.  You shouldn't use more than the
- * first 512 bytes of @root if you wish the transaction to survive a power
- * failure.  You *must* have a write lock held on @root for both stage (i)
- * and (ii).  The commit will drop the write lock.
+ * ii) Lock your superblock.  Update.  Then call dm_tm_commit() which will
+ * unlock the superblock and flush it.  No other blocks should be updated
+ * during this period.  Care should be taken to never unlock a partially
+ * updated superblock; perform any operations that could fail *before* you
+ * take the superblock lock.
  */
 int dm_tm_pre_commit(struct dm_transaction_manager *tm);
-int dm_tm_commit(struct dm_transaction_manager *tm, struct dm_block *root);
+int dm_tm_commit(struct dm_transaction_manager *tm, struct dm_block *superblock);
 
 /*
  * These methods are the only way to get hold of a writeable block.