dio: fix cache invalidation after sync writes

Commit commit 65b8291c4000e5f38fc94fb2ca0cb7e8683c8a1b ("dio: invalidate
clean pages before dio write") introduced a bug which stopped dio from
ever invalidating the page cache after writes.  It still invalidated it
before writes so most users were fine.

Karl Schendel reported ( http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/10/26/481 ) hitting
this bug when he had a buffered reader immediately reading file data
after an O_DIRECT wirter had written the data.  The kernel issued
read-ahead beyond the position of the reader which overlapped with the
O_DIRECT writer.  The failure to invalidate after writes caused the
reader to see stale data from the read-ahead.

The following patch is originally from Karl.  The following commentary
is his:

	The below 3rd try takes on your suggestion of just invalidating
	no matter what the retval from the direct_IO call.  I ran it
	thru the test-case several times and it has worked every time.
	The post-invalidate is probably still too early for async-directio,
	but I don't have a testcase for that;  just sync.  And, this
	won't be any worse in the async case.

I added a test to the aio-dio-regress repository which mimics Karl's IO
pattern.  It verifed the bad behaviour and that the patch fixed it.  I
agree with Karl, this still doesn't help the case where a buffered
reader follows an AIO O_DIRECT writer.  That will require a bit more
work.

This gives up on the idea of returning EIO to indicate to userspace that
stale data remains if the invalidation failed.

Signed-off-by: Zach Brown <zach.brown@oracle.com>
Cc: Karl Schendel <kschendel@datallegro.com>
Cc: Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@kvack.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Leonid Ananiev <leonid.i.ananiev@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 file changed