Re: [Bug] Reproducible data corruption on i5-3340M: Please continue your great work! :-)

[Ben Tebulin <tebulin@googlemail.com>]

Am 15.08.2013 20:00, schrieb Linus Torvalds:
> Ok, so I've slept on it, and here's my current thinking.
> [...]  

Many thoughts which as a user I'm am unable to follow  ;-)

> This patch tries to fix the interface instead of trying to patch up
> the individual places that *should* set the range some particular way
> [...]
> This patch is against current git, so to apply you need to have
> that commit e6c495a96ce0 cherry-picked to older kernels first.

I took a shot based on 3.9.11 + e6c495a96ce0. The reason why I don't
simply use the current git master is, that for some reasons my
linux-image-*.deb become 750MB and larger since 3.10.y and I have no
clue at all why and what to do about it.

The patch failed. Due to my outstanding incompetence I resorted into
applying it onto master, cherry-picking that back and trying to resolve
the remaining conflicts correctly.

>  - I have no idea whether this will fix the problem Ben sees, but I
> feel happier about the code, because now any place that forgets to set
> up start/end will work just fine, because they are always valid. 

Simpler code? Resilient API? Happy people? Great!

> Ben, please test. I'm worried that the problem you see is something 
> even more fundamentally wrong with the whole "oops, must flush in the
> middle" logic, but I'm _hoping_ this fixes it.

It's gone.

Really!

I git-fsck'ed successfully around 30 times in a row.
And even all the other things still seem to work ;-)

Honestly I have to confess that I'm deeply impressed how this finally
worked out: I just threw a particular, innocent-looking commit hash and
nothing more into the round. And while still being unsure if this might
be a plain user space issue, only 24h later I received a 11kb sized
kernel patch (with blatant typos in it !1! *g* ) apparently solving my
issue.

/me happy now, too! :)

- Ben