Linus, Andrew, please apply the bug fix patch at the end of this reply for .22. > >>One of our perf. team ran into this while doing some runs. > >>I didn't see anything obvious - it looks like we converted > >>async IO to synchronous one. I didn't spend much time digging > >>around. OK, I think this BUG_ON() is just broken. I wasn't able to find any obvious bugs from reading the code which would cause the BUG_ON() to fire. If it's reproducible I'd love to hear what the recipe is. I did notice that this BUG_ON() is evaluating dio after having dropped it's ref :/. So it's not completely absurd to fear that it's a race with the dio's memory being reused, but that'd be a pretty tight race. Let's remove this stupid BUG_ON and see if that test box still has trouble. It might just hit the valid BUG_ON a few lines down, but this unsafe BUG_ON needs to go. ------- dio: remove bogus refcounting BUG_ON Badari Pulavarty reported a case of this BUG_ON is triggering during testing. It's completely bogus and should be removed. It's trying to notice if we left references to the dio hanging around in the sync case. They should have been dropped as IO completed while this path was in dio_await_completion(). This condition will also be checked, via some twisty logic, by the BUG_ON(ret != -EIOCBQUEUED) a few lines lower. So to start this BUG_ON() is redundant. More fatally, it's dereferencing dio-> after having dropped its reference. It's only safe to dereference the dio after releasing the lock if the final reference was just dropped. Another CPU might free the dio in bio completion and reuse the memory after this path drops the dio lock but before the BUG_ON() is evaluated. This patch passed aio+dio regression unit tests and aio-stress on ext3. Signed-off-by: Zach Brown <zach.brown@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@xxxxxxxxxx> diff -r 509ce354ae1b fs/direct-io.c --- a/fs/direct-io.c Sun Jul 01 22:00:49 2007 +0000 +++ b/fs/direct-io.c Tue Jul 03 14:56:41 2007 -0700 @@ -1106,7 +1106,7 @@ direct_io_worker(int rw, struct kiocb *i spin_lock_irqsave(&dio->bio_lock, flags); ret2 = --dio->refcount; spin_unlock_irqrestore(&dio->bio_lock, flags); - BUG_ON(!dio->is_async && ret2 != 0); + if (ret2 == 0) { ret = dio_complete(dio, offset, ret); kfree(dio); - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html