Re: [PATCHv2 1/1] jbd2: Fix I/O hang in jbd2_journal_release_jbd_inode

[Brian King <brking@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On 07/21/2010 02:02 PM, Jan Kara wrote:
>>
>> I've been debugging a hang in jbd2_journal_release_jbd_inode
>> which is being seen on Power 6 systems quite a lot. When we get
>> in the hung state, all I/O to the disk in question gets blocked
>> where we stay indefinitely. Looking at the task list, I can see
>> we are stuck in jbd2_journal_release_jbd_inode waiting on a
>> wake up. I added some debug code to detect this scenario and
>> dump additional data if we were stuck in jbd2_journal_release_jbd_inode
>> for longer than 30 minutes. When it hit, I was able to see that
>> i_flags was 0, suggesting we missed the wake up.
>>
>> This patch changes i_flags to be an unsigned long, uses bit operators
>> to access it, and adds barriers around the accesses. Prior to applying
>> this patch, we were regularly hitting this hang on numerous systems
>> in our test environment. After applying the patch, the hangs no longer
>> occur. Its still not clear to me why the j_list_lock doesn't protect us
>> in this path.
>   Thanks for debugging this! I was thinking hard about how it could happen that
> wake_up_bit doesn't wake up the waiter but I haven't found any explanation. All
> the waitqueue work seems to be properly wrapped inside the j_list_lock so
> even the waitqueue_active check in wake_up_bit should be fine.
>   I'd really like to understand what in my mind-model of spinlocks etc. is
> wrong. So could you maybe run a test with the attached debug patch and
> dump 'wait.seen' value in the hung task?
>   And one more question - if you remove 'waitqueue_active' check from
> kernel/wait.c:__wake_up_bit
>   is the problem still present? Thanks a lot in advance.

I'll see about getting one of our systems loaded up with this change and see
what happens. 

Thanks!

Brian

-- 
Brian King
Linux on Power Virtualization
IBM Linux Technology Center