Re: repeatable slab corruption with LTP msgctl08

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:15:37 -0700 Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:02:00 -0700 Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:34:49 -0700 Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:13:24 -0700 Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Running current mainline on my old 2-way PIII.  Distro is RH FC1.  LTP
> > > > version is ltp-full-20070228 (lots of retro-computing there).
> > > > 
> > > > Config is at http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/config-vmm.txt
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > ./testcases/bin/msgctl08 crashes after ten minutes or so:
> > > 
> > > ah, it runs to completion in about ten seconds on 2.6.25, so it'll be
> > > easy for someone to bisect it.
> > > 
> > > What's that?  Sigh.  OK.  I wasn't doing anything much anyway.
> > 
> > Oh drat.  git-bisect tells me that this one-year-old msgctl08's
> > execution time vastly increased when we added
> > 
> > commit f7bf3df8be72d98afa84f5ff183e14c1ba1e560d
> > Author: Nadia Derbey <Nadia.Derbey@bull.net>
> > Date:   Tue Apr 29 01:00:39 2008 -0700
> > 
> >     ipc: scale msgmni to the amount of lowmem
> >     
> > 
> > But we already knew that, and LTP got changed to fix it.
> > 
> > So I was wrong in assuming that the long-execution-time correlates with
> > the slab-corruption bug.
> > 
> > And the slab corruption bug takes half an hour to reproduce and an
> > unknown amount of time to not-reproduce.  I don't think I'll be able to
> > complete this before I disappear for over a week.
> > 
> 
> Doing
> 
> 	echo 16 > /proc/sys/kernel/msgmni
> 
> on the tree at the above bisection point
> (f7bf3df8be72d98afa84f5ff183e14c1ba1e560d is most-recently-applied
> patch), msgctl08 runs to completion in 15.7 seconds.
> 
> Doing the same thing on 2.6.26-rc5-mm3, msgctl08 also runs to
> completion, in 20.9 seconds.  So
> 
> - it got slower
> 
> - the crash requires the huge value of /proc/sys/kernel/msgmni (1746)

                                                                  actually, it's 1741.

>   to reproduce.
>