Re: [PATCH -next] mm/filemap: fix a data race in filemap_fault()

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 02:20:48PM -0500, Qian Cai wrote:
> On Mon, 2020-02-10 at 09:25 -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 12:00:29PM -0500, Qian Cai wrote:
> > > @@ -2622,7 +2622,7 @@ void filemap_map_pages(struct vm_fault *vmf,
> > >  		if (page->index >= max_idx)
> > >  			goto unlock;
> > >  
> > > -		if (file->f_ra.mmap_miss > 0)
> > > +		if (data_race(file->f_ra.mmap_miss > 0))
> > >  			file->f_ra.mmap_miss--;
> > 
> > How is this safe?  Two threads can each see 1, and then both decrement the
> > in-memory copy, causing it to end up at -1.
> 
> Well, I meant to say it is safe from *data* races rather than all other races,
> but it is a good catch for the underflow cases and makes some sense to fix them
> together (so we don't need to touch the same lines over and over again).

My point is that this is a legitimate warning from the sanitiser.
The point of your patches should not be to remove all the warnings!