Stable pages - is this "racy" ?

I had a look at the paper the work I measured was based on, and wonder if we're really looking at a race condition: we take a checksum, queue the data for I/O and compare the data as part of or after the I/O to see if an error has occurred.

Delaying, duplicating or COWing allows us to survive or avoid the data changing while the I/O is queued, which is a pretty long time compared to anything happening in main memory. The speed difference gives us a relatively large period in which a program can race ahead of the disk.

If the purpose is to validate the disk write, one would want to do the checksum as late as possible before the write, and verify it either as part of hardware write or via a read-after-write step. That keeps the time period tiny.

If the purpose is to validate it from end to end, I suspect you need more than one check. One check would need to be done as the data is queued, to be sure it made it to the queue ok, which would need to be amended if the page in queue is coalesced with a later write. In the latter case you have a new, amended checksum to check as-or-after the write.

Alas, I'm not following the main list these days, so I'm unclear of the fine details of the requirements you face!

--dave