This reverts commit 6527c2bdf1, 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>
6814d7a912