• Hugh Dickins's avatar
    block: replace __getblk_slow misfix by grow_dev_page fix · 676ce6d5
    Hugh Dickins authored
    Commit 91f68c89 ("block: fix infinite loop in __getblk_slow")
    is not good: a successful call to grow_buffers() cannot guarantee
    that the page won't be reclaimed before the immediate next call to
    __find_get_block(), which is why there was always a loop there.
    
    Yesterday I got "EXT4-fs error (device loop0): __ext4_get_inode_loc:3595:
    inode #19278: block 664: comm cc1: unable to read itable block" on console,
    which pointed to this commit.
    
    I've been trying to bisect for weeks, why kbuild-on-ext4-on-loop-on-tmpfs
    sometimes fails from a missing header file, under memory pressure on
    ppc G5.  I've never seen this on x86, and I've never seen it on 3.5-rc7
    itself, despite that commit being in there: bisection pointed to an
    irrelevant pinctrl merge, but hard to tell when failure takes between
    18 minutes and 38 hours (but so far it's happened quicker on 3.6-rc2).
    
    (I've since found such __ext4_get_inode_loc errors in /var/log/messages
    from previous weeks: why the message never appeared on console until
    yesterday morning is a mystery for another day.)
    
    Revert 91f68c89, restoring __getblk_slow() to how it was (plus
    a checkpatch nitfix).  Simplify the interface between grow_buffers()
    and grow_dev_page(), and avoid the infinite loop beyond end of device
    by instead checking init_page_buffers()'s end_block there (I presume
    that's more efficient than a repeated call to blkdev_max_block()),
    returning -ENXIO to __getblk_slow() in that case.
    
    And remove akpm's ten-year-old "__getblk() cannot fail ... weird"
    comment, but that is worrying: are all users of __getblk() really
    now prepared for a NULL bh beyond end of device, or will some oops??
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # 3.0 3.2 3.4 3.5
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
    676ce6d5
buffer.c 85.1 KB