Recent stress tests doing CPU online/offline in a loop revealed at least two separate bugs. They result in CPUs either being deadlocked on a spinlock or the machine halting entirely. My reproduction case used a large numbers of simultaneous kernel compiles on an 8-core machine while CPUs were continually being brought online and offline in a loop. This small series includes two patches that allow hotplug stress tests to pass for me when applied to 3.2. This does not claim to solve all CPU hotplug problems. For example, the test configuration did not have PREEMPT enabled but there is no harm in eliminating these bugs at least. Patch 1 looks at a sysfs dirent problem whereby under stress a dentry lock is taken twice. This is a sysfs-specific test but a dcache related fix also exists as an RFC. Patch 2 notes that the page allocator is sending IPIs without calling get_online_cpus() to protect the cpuonline mask from changes. In low memory situations, this allows an IPI to be sent to a CPU going offline. This patch fixes drain_all_pages() and then changes the page allocator to only drain local lists with preempt disabled instead of sending an IPI on the grounds the IPI costs while having a marginal benefit. fs/sysfs/dir.c | 4 ++-- mm/page_alloc.c | 16 ++++++++++++---- 2 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) -- 1.7.3.4 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>