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Nikos Tsironis authored
dm-clone maintains an on-disk bitmap which records which regions are valid in the destination device, i.e., which regions have already been hydrated, or have been written to directly, via user I/O. Setting a bit in the on-disk bitmap meas the corresponding region is valid in the destination device and we redirect all I/O regarding it to the destination device. Suppose the destination device has a volatile write-back cache and the following sequence of events occur: 1. A region gets hydrated, either through the background hydration or because it was written to directly, via user I/O. 2. The commit timeout expires and we commit the metadata, marking that region as valid in the destination device. 3. The system crashes and the destination device's cache has not been flushed, meaning the region's data are lost. The next time we read that region we read it from the destination device, since the metadata have been successfully committed, but the data are lost due to the crash, so we read garbage instead of the old data. This has several implications: 1. In case of background hydration or of writes with size smaller than the region size (which means we first copy the whole region and then issue the smaller write), we corrupt data that the user never touched. 2. In case of writes with size equal to the device's logical block size, we fail to provide atomic sector writes. When the system recovers the user will read garbage from the sector instead of the old data or the new data. 3. In case of writes without the FUA flag set, after the system recovers, the written sectors will contain garbage instead of a random mix of sectors containing either old data or new data, thus we fail again to provide atomic sector writes. 4. Even when the user flushes the dm-clone device, because we first commit the metadata and then pass down the flush, the same risk for corruption exists (if the system crashes after the metadata have been committed but before the flush is passed down). The only case which is unaffected is that of writes with size equal to the region size and with the FUA flag set. But, because FUA writes trigger metadata commits, this case can trigger the corruption indirectly. To solve this and avoid the potential data corruption we flush the destination device **before** committing the metadata. This ensures that any freshly hydrated regions, for which we commit the metadata, are properly written to non-volatile storage and won't be lost in case of a crash. Fixes: 7431b783 ("dm: add clone target") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v5.4+ Signed-off-by: Nikos Tsironis <ntsironis@arrikto.com> Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
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