This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled writeback: fix negative bdi max pause to the 3.4-stable tree which can be found at: http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary The filename of the patch is: writeback-fix-negative-bdi-max-pause.patch and it can be found in the queue-3.4 subdirectory. If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> know about it. >From e3b6c655b91e01a1dade056cfa358581b47a5351 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 13:47:03 -0700 Subject: writeback: fix negative bdi max pause From: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx> commit e3b6c655b91e01a1dade056cfa358581b47a5351 upstream. Toralf runs trinity on UML/i386. After some time it hangs and the last message line is BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s! [trinity-child0:1521] It's found that pages_dirtied becomes very large. More than 1000000000 pages in this case: period = HZ * pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit; BUG_ON(pages_dirtied > 2000000000); BUG_ON(pages_dirtied > 1000000000); <--------- UML debug printf shows that we got negative pause here: ick: pause : -984 ick: pages_dirtied : 0 ick: task_ratelimit: 0 pause: + if (pause < 0) { + extern int printf(char *, ...); + printf("ick : pause : %li\n", pause); + printf("ick: pages_dirtied : %lu\n", pages_dirtied); + printf("ick: task_ratelimit: %lu\n", task_ratelimit); + BUG_ON(1); + } trace_balance_dirty_pages(bdi, Since pause is bounded by [min_pause, max_pause] where min_pause is also bounded by max_pause. It's suspected and demonstrated that the max_pause calculation goes wrong: ick: pause : -717 ick: min_pause : -177 ick: max_pause : -717 ick: pages_dirtied : 14 ick: task_ratelimit: 0 The problem lies in the two "long = unsigned long" assignments in bdi_max_pause() which might go negative if the highest bit is 1, and the min_t(long, ...) check failed to protect it falling under 0. Fix all of them by using "unsigned long" throughout the function. Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx> Reported-by: Toralf Förster <toralf.foerster@xxxxxx> Tested-by: Toralf Förster <toralf.foerster@xxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> Cc: Richard Weinberger <richard@xxxxxx> Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- mm/page-writeback.c | 10 +++++----- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) --- a/mm/page-writeback.c +++ b/mm/page-writeback.c @@ -1072,11 +1072,11 @@ static unsigned long dirty_poll_interval return 1; } -static long bdi_max_pause(struct backing_dev_info *bdi, - unsigned long bdi_dirty) +static unsigned long bdi_max_pause(struct backing_dev_info *bdi, + unsigned long bdi_dirty) { - long bw = bdi->avg_write_bandwidth; - long t; + unsigned long bw = bdi->avg_write_bandwidth; + unsigned long t; /* * Limit pause time for small memory systems. If sleeping for too long @@ -1088,7 +1088,7 @@ static long bdi_max_pause(struct backing t = bdi_dirty / (1 + bw / roundup_pow_of_two(1 + HZ / 8)); t++; - return min_t(long, t, MAX_PAUSE); + return min_t(unsigned long, t, MAX_PAUSE); } static long bdi_min_pause(struct backing_dev_info *bdi, Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx are queue-3.4/writeback-fix-negative-bdi-max-pause.patch -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html