Intensive swapoff testing shows shmem_unuse spinning on an entry in
shmem_swaplist pointing to itself: how does that come about? Days pass...
First guess is this: shmem_delete_inode tests list_empty without taking the
global mutex (so the swapping case doesn't slow down the common case); but
there's an instant in shmem_unuse_inode's list_move_tail when the list entry
may appear empty (a rare case, because it's actually moving the head not the
the list member). So there's a danger of leaving the inode on the swaplist
when it's freed, then reinitialized to point to itself when reused. Fix that
by skipping the list_move_tail when it's a no-op, which happens to plug this.
But this same spinning then surfaces on another machine. Ah, I'd never
suspected it, but shmem_writepage's swaplist manipulation is unsafe: though we
still hold page lock, which would hold off inode deletion if the page were in
pagecache, it doesn't hold off once it's in swapcache (free_swap_and_cache
doesn't wait on locked pages). Hmm: we could put the the inode on swaplist
earlier, but then shmem_unuse_inode could never prune unswapped inodes.
Fix this with an igrab before dropping info->lock, as in shmem_unuse_inode;
though I am a little uneasy about the iput which has to follow - it works, and
I see nothing wrong with it, but it is surprising that shmem inode deletion
may now occur below shmem_writepage. Revisit this fix later?
And while we're looking at these races: the way shmem_unuse tests swapped
without holding info->lock looks unsafe, if we've more than one swap area: a
racing shmem_writepage on another page of the same inode could be putting it
in swapcache, just as we're deciding to remove the inode from swaplist -
there's a danger of going on swap without being listed, so a later swapoff
would hang, being unable to locate the entry. Move that test and removal down
into shmem_unuse_inode, once info->lock is held.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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