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  • Dave Chinner's avatar
    xfs: serialise unaligned direct IOs · eda77982
    Dave Chinner authored
    
    
    When two concurrent unaligned, non-overlapping direct IOs are issued
    to the same block, the direct Io layer will race to zero the block.
    The result is that one of the concurrent IOs will overwrite data
    written by the other IO with zeros. This is demonstrated by the
    xfsqa test 240.
    
    To avoid this problem, serialise all unaligned direct IOs to an
    inode with a big hammer. We need a big hammer approach as we need to
    serialise AIO as well, so we can't just block writes on locks.
    Hence, the big hammer is calling xfs_ioend_wait() while holding out
    other unaligned direct IOs from starting.
    
    We don't bother trying to serialised aligned vs unaligned IOs as
    they are overlapping IO and the result of concurrent overlapping IOs
    is undefined - the result of either IO is a valid result so we let
    them race. Hence we only penalise unaligned IO, which already has a
    major overhead compared to aligned IO so this isn't a major problem.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarAlex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
    eda77982