Re: [PATCH] Possible fix to recent data corruption on HEAD since USB2

On Thursday 16 April 2009 2:47:38 pm Alexey Shuvaev wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 01:36:18PM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> > Due to some good sleuthing by avg_at_,
> > there is a patch that might fix the recent 
> > reports of data corruption on current.  It would explain some of the recent 
> > reports where a file that was read would have missing gaps of bytes.  The 
> > problem is with the BUS_DMA_KEEP_PG_OFFSET changes to bus_dma.  When a bounce 
> > page was used by USB2, the changes to bus_dma would actually change the 
> > starting virtual and physical addresses of the bounce page.  When the bounce 
> > page was no longer needed it was left in this bogus state.  Later if another 
> > device used the same bounce page for DMA it would use the wrong offset and 
> > address.  The issue there is if the second device was doing a full page of 
> > I/O.  In that case the DMA from the device would actually spill over into the 
> > next page which could in theory be used by another DMA request.  It could 
> > also break alignment assumptions (since the previous PG_OFFSET may not be 
> > aligned and the bus_dma code assumes bounce pages for the !PG_OFFSET case are 
> > page aligned).  The quick fix is to always restore the bounce page to the 
> > normal state when a PG_OFFSET DMA request is finished.   I'd actually prefer 
> > not ever touching the page's starting addresses, but those changes would be 
> > more invasive I believe.
> > 
> > http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/patches/dma_sg.patch
> > 
> Am I right that hardware prerequisite in order to observe these problems
> is amd64 + 4Gb or more of RAM?

Well, i386 with PAE would do it as well.  Basically, you need USB + one other
device that use bounce pages and the other device ends up with corruption.

> Is it possible to fabricate some (artificial) test case to stress this
> particular situation (interleaved use of bounce pages by USB and some other
> device (?HDD?))?

I haven't constructed one though it might be possible to do so.

> Asking because as I understand the data corruption is silent
> and affected consumer (of bounce pages) should have some mechanism
> of detecting this (e.g. zfs' CRCs).
> In my case stess testing unpatched system till UFS filesystems are dead
> is no fun...

Understood.  I know some other folks are going to test this and if there is
early success that may make the risk easier to take.

-- 
John Baldwin