On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 02:58:12PM -0700, Hugh Dickins wrote: > I suspect there's a bug in the XArray handling in collapse_file(), > which sometimes leaves empty nodes behind. Urp, yes, that can easily happen. /* This will be less messy when we use multi-index entries */ do { xas_lock_irq(&xas); xas_create_range(&xas); if (!xas_error(&xas)) break; if (!xas_nomem(&xas, GFP_KERNEL)) { result = SCAN_FAIL; goto out; } xas_create_range() can absolutely create nodes with zero entries. So if we create m/n nodes and then it runs out of memory (or cgroup denies it), we can leave nodes in the tree with zero entries. There are three options for fixing it ... - Switch to using multi-index entries. We need to do this anyway, but I don't yet have a handle on the bugs that you found last time I pushed this into linux-next. At -rc5 seems like a late stage to be trying this solution. - Add an xas_prune_range() that gets called on failure. Should be straightforward to write, but will be obsolete as soon as we do the above and it's a pain for the callers. - Change how xas_create_range() works to merely preallocate the xa_nodes and not insert them into the tree until we're trying to insert data into them. I favour this option, and this scenario is amenable to writing a test that will simulate failure halfway through. I'm going to start on option 3 now.