Revert "[PATCH] generic_file_buffered_write(): deadlock on vectored write"
This reverts commit 6527c2bd, which fixed the following bug: When prefaulting in the pages in generic_file_buffered_write(), we only faulted in the pages for the firts segment of the iovec. If the second of successive segment described a mmapping of the page into which we're write()ing, and that page is not up-to-date, the fault handler tries to lock the already-locked page (to bring it up to date) and deadlocks. An exploit for this bug is in writev-deadlock-demo.c, in http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/stuff/ext3-tools.tar.gz . (These demos assume blocksize < PAGE_CACHE_SIZE). The problem with this fix is that it takes the kernel back to doing a single prepare_write()/commit_write() per iovec segment. So in the worst case we'll run prepare_write+commit_write 1024 times where we previously would have run it once. The other problem with the fix is that it fix all the locking problems. <insert numbers obtained via ext3-tools's writev-speed.c here> And apparently this change killed NFS overwrite performance, because, I suppose, it talks to the server for each prepare_write+commit_write. So just back that patch out - we'll be fixing the deadlock by other means. Nick says: also it only ever actually papered over the bug, because after faulting in the pages, they might be unmapped or reclaimed. Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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