Hi,
I've never seen these trigger, but they look theoretically possible.
When processing the completion of a SCSI request in a bottom-half,
__scsi_end_request() can find all the buffers associated with the request
haven't been completed (ie. leftovers).
One question is; can this ever happen?
If it can't then the code should be removed from __scsi_end_request(),
if it can happen then there appears to be a few problems;
The request is re-queued to the block layer via
scsi_queue_next_request(), which uses the "special" pointer in the request
structure to remember the Scsi_Cmnd associated with the request. The SCSI
request function is then called, but doesn't guarantee to immediately
process the re-queued request even though it was added at the head (say,
the queue has become plugged). This can trigger two possible bugs.
The first is that __scsi_end_request() doesn't decrement the
hard_nr_sectors count in the request. As the request is back on the
queue, it is possible for newly arriving buffer-heads to merge with the
heads already hanging off the request. This merging uses the
hard_nr_sectors when calculating both the merged hard_nr_sectors and
nr_sectors counts.
As the request is at the head, only back-merging can occur, but if
__scsi_end_request() triggers another uncompleted request to be re-queued,
it is possible to get front merging as well.
The merging of a re-queued request looks safe, except for the
hard_nr_sectors. This patch corrects the hard_nr_sectors accounting.
The second bug is from request merging in attempt_merge().
For a re-queued request, the request structure is the one embedded in
the Scsi_Cmnd (which is a copy of the request taken in the
scsi_request_fn).
In attempt_merge(), q->merge_requests_fn() is called to see the requests
are allowed to merge. __scsi_merge_requests_fn() checks number of
segments, etc, but doesn't check if one of the requests is a re-queued one
(ie. no test against ->special).
This can lead to attempt_merge() releasing the embedded request
structure (which, as an extract copy, has the ->q set, so to
blkdev_release_request() it looks like a request which originated from
the block layer). This isn't too healthy.
The fix here is to add a check in __scsi_merge_requests_fn() to check
for ->special being non-NULL.
The attached patch is against 2.4.3.
Jens, Eric, anyone, comments?
Mark