Re: How many people are using 2.6.16?

[David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>]

On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 08:02:37AM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 06:36:48PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > The issue was somewhat confused by people certainly *reporting* it for 
> > older kernels. Also, as part of the dirty bit cleanups and sanity 
> > checkingwe did actually seem to fix a long-standing CIFS corruption (and 
> > apparently reisertfs/XFS problems too).
> > 
> > But the *common* case was actually introduced with 2.6.19, and 2.6.16 
> > wouldn't be affected. 
> 
> Thanks for the clarifications.
> 
> Regarding the longstanding CIFS/reiserfs/XFS problems, it seems the 
> status is:
....
> XFS:
> fix not yet in your tree

With the WARN_ON() in cancel_dirty_page() removed:

http://git2.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=ecdfc9787fe527491baefc22dce8b2dbd5b2908d

XFS will behave exactly the same as 2.6.19 and previous releases.
The patches I sent were only ever really workarounds to greatly
reduce the race window that could lead to the warning being
triggered.

We really need Nick Piggin's invalidate/truncate/mmap race fixes to
properly solve the XFS issues uncovered by Linus' changes. Given
that we haven't had any reported cases of data corruption on XFS
(and I couldn't trigger any even when seeing the warnings) I think
we are fairly safe just maintaining the status quo and waiting the
right fix to make it's way into the tree....

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
Principal Engineer
SGI Australian Software Group