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@suse.de>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@ucw.cz>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
7766755a2f