NOT !! Re: (reiserfs) 2.3.99-pre9-5 fixed deadlocks with ReiserFS

From: Cyrille Chepelov (home) (chepelov@calixo.net)
Date: Wed May 24 2000 - 18:02:09 EDT

  • Next message: Alex Buell: "Re: Announcing CML2, a replacement for the kbuild system"

    On Tue, 23 May 2000, Matt Yourst wrote:

    > As you may know, there were some deadlock problems with ReiserFS 3.6.5 and
    > kernel >= 2.3.99-pre7-4. I submitted a patch for this problem earlier but it
    > also broke the swap-out code in some other cases. Fortunately, whatever was
    > originally causing the race condition with ReiserFS and writing out dirty mmaped
    > pages now appears to be fixed as of 2.3.99-pre9-5. I have not stress-tested this
    > prepatch though, so others might want to confirm this too.

    The -pre9 + reiserfs 3.6.5 combo is still definitely *DANGEROUS*.
    In particular, this breaks badly when you do a simple
            apt-get dist-upgrade
    When that happens, apt gets locked. Calling top, ps, killall, or even
            ls -l /proc/<pid>
    gives you a stuck, unkillable process.

    strace points its fingers at sys_mlock(), but I don't know how reliable
    this is.

    This was still quite bearable. But there's worse. Once, I didn't reboot
    after I stuck an apt-get (circa pre9-1), and worked with the machine. Next
    reboot, bang ! My noffle database was clobbered... with copies of stuff
    from /var/lib/dpkg/* (fortunately, it was not the other way around).

    (currently, I've got only /var on reiserfs ; I had some plans to move the
    other partitions (I've got a really bad pollen, acarians and e2fsck
    allergy, the latter being absolutely not seasonal now) ; this will have to
    wait for the 3.5.21 bugs to be squashed, I'm afraid was announced
    recently).

    Traces and tests (of new patches) welcome, on request.

            -- Cyrille

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Grumpf.

    -
    To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
    the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
    Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 24 2000 - 19:31:37 EDT