The patch titled Fix /proc dcache deadlock in do_exit has been removed from the -mm tree. Its filename was fix-proc-dcache-deadlock-in-do_exit.patch This patch was dropped because it was merged into mainline or a subsystem tree The current -mm tree may be found at http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/mmotm/ ------------------------------------------------------ Subject: Fix /proc dcache deadlock in do_exit From: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@xxxxxxx> This patch fixes a sles9 system hang in start_this_handle from a customer with some heavy workload where all tasks are waiting on kjournald to commit the transaction, but kjournald waits on t_updates to go down to zero (it never does). This was reported as a lowmem shortage deadlock but when checking the debug data I noticed the VM wasn't under pressure at all (well it was really under vm pressure, because lots of tasks hanged in the VM prune_dcache methods trying to flush dirty inodes, but no task was hanging in GFP_NOFS mode, the holder of the journal handle should have if this was a vm issue in the first place). No task was apparently holding the leftover handle in the committing transaction, so I deduced t_updates was stuck to 1 because a journal_stop was never run by some path (this turned out to be correct). With a debug patch adding proper reverse links and stack trace logging in ext3 deployed in production, I found journal_stop is never run because mark_inode_dirty_sync is called inside release_task called by do_exit. (that was quite fun because I would have never thought about this subtleness, I thought a regular path in ext3 had a bug and it forgot to call journal_stop) do_exit->release_task->mark_inode_dirty_sync->schedule() (will never come back to run journal_stop) The reason is that shrink_dcache_parent is racy by design (feature not a bug) and it can do blocking I/O in some case, but the point is that calling shrink_dcache_parent at the last stage of do_exit isn't safe for self-reaping tasks. I guess the memory pressure of the unbalanced highmem system allowed to trigger this more easily. Now mainline doesn't have this line in iput (like sles9 has): if (inode->i_state & I_DIRTY_DELAYED) mark_inode_dirty_sync(inode); so it will probably not crash with ext3, but for example ext2 implements an I/O-blocking ext2_put_inode that will lead to similar screwups with ext2_free_blocks never coming back and it's definitely wrong to call blocking-IO paths inside do_exit. So this should fix a subtle bug in mainline too (not verified in practice though). The equivalent fix for ext3 is also not verified yet to fix the problem in sles9 but I don't have doubt it will (it usually takes days to crash, so it'll take weeks to be sure). An alternate fix would be to offload that work to a kernel thread, but I don't think a reschedule for this is worth it, the vm should be able to collect those entries for the synchronous release_task. Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@xxxxxxx> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxx> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@xxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- fs/proc/base.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff -puN fs/proc/base.c~fix-proc-dcache-deadlock-in-do_exit fs/proc/base.c --- a/fs/proc/base.c~fix-proc-dcache-deadlock-in-do_exit +++ a/fs/proc/base.c @@ -2321,7 +2321,8 @@ static void proc_flush_task_mnt(struct v name.len = snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "%d", pid); dentry = d_hash_and_lookup(mnt->mnt_root, &name); if (dentry) { - shrink_dcache_parent(dentry); + if (!(current->flags & PF_EXITING)) + shrink_dcache_parent(dentry); d_drop(dentry); dput(dentry); } _ Patches currently in -mm which might be from andrea@xxxxxxx are origin.patch oom-add-sysctl-to-enable-task-memory-dump.patch - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe mm-commits" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html