On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 08:28:18PM +0200, eworm@xxxxxxxx wrote: > > After mounting the partitions and logging in it took half a minute to hang > the system (or at least freeze all applications that access the fs). The > log contains the following: > > kernel BUG at fs/ext4/mballoc.c:3963! This means that we tried to truncate/delete a file while there were still blocks on i_prealloc_list. I think I see the problem. And the reason why we haven't noticed it is that it only shows up if you have an indirect block-based file, and you truncate it when you have previously been writing to it (so i_prealloc_list is not empty). The problem is that we call ext4_discard_reservation() too late, after we've started calling ext4_free_branches(), which calls ext4_free_blocks(), which ultimately calls ext4_mb_return_to_preallocation(), which is what is BUG-checking. Can you reproduce the bug? Things are a little busy on my end, so I don't have time to try to create a reproducer and test the patch, at least not for a day or so. The following patch passes the "It Builds, Ship It!" test, but not much else. :-) If you could report (a) whether or not you can reproduce the failure, and (b) whether this patch fixes things, I would be most grateful. Thanks, regards, - Ted commit b86b40e630893e74d3259f129060cfcb115f7fb9 Author: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> Date: Wed Aug 13 16:07:32 2008 -0400 ext4: Fix potential truncate BUG due to i_prealloc_list being non-empty We need to call ext4_discard_reservation() earlier in ext4_truncate(), to avoid a BUG() in ext4_mb_return_to_preallocation(), which is called (ultimately) by ext4_free_blocks(). So we must ditch the blocks on i_prealloc_list before we start freeing the data blocks. Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@xxxxxxx> diff --git a/fs/ext4/inode.c b/fs/ext4/inode.c index 368ec6b..7f7b0c5 100644 --- a/fs/ext4/inode.c +++ b/fs/ext4/inode.c @@ -3512,6 +3512,9 @@ void ext4_truncate(struct inode *inode) * modify the block allocation tree. */ down_write(&ei->i_data_sem); + + ext4_discard_reservation(inode); + /* * The orphan list entry will now protect us from any crash which * occurs before the truncate completes, so it is now safe to propagate @@ -3581,8 +3584,6 @@ do_indirects: ; } - ext4_discard_reservation(inode); - up_write(&ei->i_data_sem); inode->i_mtime = inode->i_ctime = ext4_current_time(inode); ext4_mark_inode_dirty(handle, inode); -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html