Skip to content
  • Theodore Ts'o's avatar
    mm: retry writepages() on ENOMEM when doing an data integrity writeback · 80a2ea9f
    Theodore Ts'o authored
    
    
    Currently, file system's writepages() function must not fail with an
    ENOMEM, since if they do, it's possible for buffered data to be lost.
    This is because on a data integrity writeback writepages() gets called
    but once, and if it returns ENOMEM, if you're lucky the error will get
    reflected back to the userspace process calling fsync().  If you
    aren't lucky, the user is unmounting the file system, and the dirty
    pages will simply be lost.
    
    For this reason, file system code generally will use GFP_NOFS, and in
    some cases, will retry the allocation in a loop, on the theory that
    "kernel livelocks are temporary; data loss is forever".
    Unfortunately, this can indeed cause livelocks, since inside the
    writepages() call, the file system is holding various mutexes, and
    these mutexes may prevent the OOM killer from killing its targetted
    victim if it is also holding on to those mutexes.
    
    A better solution would be to allow writepages() to call the memory
    allocator with flags that give greater latitude to the allocator to
    fail, and then release its locks and return ENOMEM, and in the case of
    background writeback, the writes can be retried at a later time.  In
    the case of data-integrity writeback retry after waiting a brief
    amount of time.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTheodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
    80a2ea9f