We got a report recently about a panic in RHEL5 (2.6.18 based kernel). The problem appears to be that a task_cleanup workqueue job ran and got passed a pointer to an xprt that had been freed. The bug is here in case anyone is interested in the details: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=611938 The situation seems to be pretty difficult to reproduce, but I don't see anything that's intended to ensure that this doesn't occur in RHEL5 or mainline. The task_cleanup workqueue job doesn't hold a reference to the xprt, and the job isn't canceled when the xprt is torn down. Bruce had a look and suggested that we may need something like the patch below (pasted in, so it probably won't apply correctly). I've tested a backported version of it on RHEL5 and it seems to work fine. Is it reasonable to cancel task_cleanup when destroying the xprt? Or, am I missing something that should prevent this situation in mainline (and perhaps isn't in RHEL5's kernel). Any help is appreciated... -----------------------------[snip]--------------------------------- diff --git a/net/sunrpc/xprt.c b/net/sunrpc/xprt.c index dcd0132..2a1f664 100644 --- a/net/sunrpc/xprt.c +++ b/net/sunrpc/xprt.c @@ -1129,6 +1129,7 @@ static void xprt_destroy(struct kref *kref) rpc_destroy_wait_queue(&xprt->sending); rpc_destroy_wait_queue(&xprt->resend); rpc_destroy_wait_queue(&xprt->backlog); + cancel_work_sync(&xprt->task_cleanup); /* * Tear down transport state and free the rpc_xprt */ -----------------------------[snip]--------------------------------- Thanks, -- Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx> -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-nfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html