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Commit 230c83af authored by Mikulas Patocka's avatar Mikulas Patocka Committed by Mike Snitzer
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dm snapshot: avoid snapshot space leak on crash



There is a possible leak of snapshot space in case of crash.

The reason for space leaking is that chunks in the snapshot device are
allocated sequentially, but they are finished (and stored in the metadata)
out of order, depending on the order in which copying finished.

For example, supposed that the metadata contains the following records
SUPERBLOCK
METADATA (blocks 0 ... 250)
DATA 0
DATA 1
DATA 2
...
DATA 250

Now suppose that you allocate 10 new data blocks 251-260. Suppose that
copying of these blocks finish out of order (block 260 finished first
and the block 251 finished last). Now, the snapshot device looks like
this:
SUPERBLOCK
METADATA (blocks 0 ... 250, 260, 259, 258, 257, 256)
DATA 0
DATA 1
DATA 2
...
DATA 250
DATA 251
DATA 252
DATA 253
DATA 254
DATA 255
METADATA (blocks 255, 254, 253, 252, 251)
DATA 256
DATA 257
DATA 258
DATA 259
DATA 260

Now, if the machine crashes after writing the first metadata block but
before writing the second metadata block, the space for areas DATA 250-255
is leaked, it contains no valid data and it will never be used in the
future.

This patch makes dm-snapshot complete exceptions in the same order they
were allocated, thus fixing this bug.

Note: when backporting this patch to the stable kernel, change the version
field in the following way:
* if version in the stable kernel is {1, 11, 1}, change it to {1, 12, 0}
* if version in the stable kernel is {1, 10, 0} or {1, 10, 1}, change it
  to {1, 10, 2}
Userspace reads the version to determine if the bug was fixed, so the
version change is needed.

Signed-off-by: default avatarMikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
parent 718822c1
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