Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 28 Aug 2002 18:37:57 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 28 Aug 2002 18:37:57 -0400 Received: from vasquez.zip.com.au ([203.12.97.41]:9477 "EHLO vasquez.zip.com.au") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Wed, 28 Aug 2002 18:37:22 -0400 Message-ID: <3D6D5128.9EE6DFDD@zip.com.au> Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 15:39:36 -0700 From: Andrew Morton X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.19-rc3 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Daniel Phillips CC: Christian Ehrhardt , lkml , "linux-mm@kvack.org" Subject: Re: MM patches against 2.5.31 References: <3D644C70.6D100EA5@zip.com.au> <3D6D3AA4.31A4AD3A@zip.com.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1003 Lines: 23 Daniel Phillips wrote: > > ... > So there's no question that the race is lurking in 2.4. I noticed several > more paths besides the one above that look suspicious as well. The bottom > line is, 2.4 needs a fix along the lines of my suggestion or Christian's, > something that can actually be proved. > > It's a wonder that this problem manifests so rarely in practice. I sort-of glanced through the 2.4 paths and it appears that in all of the places where it could do a page_cache_get/release, that would never happen because of other parts of the page state. Like: it can't be in pagecache, so we won't run writepage, and it can't have buffers, so we won't run try_to_release_page(). Of course, I might have missed a path. And, well, generally: ugh. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/