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Subject: Re: [bug, 2.6.26-rc4/rc5] sporadic bootup crashes in
	blk_lookup_devt()/prepare_namespace()
From: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Cornelia Huck <cornelia.huck@de.ibm.com>,
       Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>, Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org>,
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Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:46:53 +0200
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On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 08:29 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Jun 2008, Cornelia Huck wrote:
> > 
> > Does this crash happen with the conversion to the class iterator
> > functions (should be in linux-next) as well? They take the class
> > mutex...
> 
> I really don't think it's the locking, although I do agree that the 
> locking looks bogus _too_.
> 
> I suspect that the problem is even simpler than that. On the 
> "block_class.devices" list we can have two types of devices: the ones that 
> have been added by the block/genhd.c code (disks: dev->type "disk_type"), 
> and the ones that are added by the class layer for partitions (partitions: 
> dev.type "part_type").
> 
> And *all* the block/genhd.c loops over that device list look like this:
> 
> 	list_for_each_entry(dev, &block_class.devices, node) {
> 		if (dev->type != &disk_type)
> 			continue;
> 		sgp = dev_to_disk(dev);
> 		...
> 
> because you cannot do that "dev_to_disk()" on a partition entry (it won't 
> have a container of type gendisk, it will be of type hd_struct).
> 
> Well, all except one. Guess which one..
> 
> So I suspect that (a) yes, we need to fix the locking, but (b) the fix for 
> this particular bug is probably the trivial one appended.
> 
> And yes, this bug was introduced by commit 30f2f0eb4b ("block: do_mounts - 
> accept root=<non-existant partition>"), so the alternative is to revert it 
> entirely. Kay? 

Yeah, the patch looks fine. That could be the reason.

I think we should keep the patch, as it fixed a different issue, and it
seems the bug was there even before the patch - the function was just
not called 3 times, so even more unlikely to trigger it.

Thanks,
Kay

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