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    Be more careful about marking buffers dirty · 1be62dc1
    Linus Torvalds authored
    
    
    Mikulas Patocka noted that the optimization where we check if a buffer
    was already dirty (and we avoid re-dirtying it) was not really SMP-safe.
    
    Since the read of the old status was not synchronized with anything, an
    aggressive CPU re-ordering of memory accesses might have moved that read
    up to before the data was even written to the buffer, and another CPU
    that cleaned it again, causing the newly dirty state to never actually
    hit the disk.
    
    Admittedly this would probably never trigger in practice, but it's still
    wrong.
    
    Mikulas sent a patch that fixed the problem, but I dislike the subtlety
    of the whole optimization, so this is an alternate fix that is more
    explicit about the particular SMP ordering for the optimization, and
    separates out the speculative reads of the buffer state into its own
    conditional (and makes the memory barrier only happen if we are likely
    to actually hit the optimized case in the first place).
    
    I considered removing the optimization entirely, but Andrew argued for
    it's continued existence. I'm a push-over.
    
    Cc: Mikulas Patocka <mikulas@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz>
    Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    1be62dc1