Re: 5.3-rc1 regression with XFS log recovery

Dave Chinner
2019-08-21T00:27:52Z

On Sun, Aug 18, 2019 at 07:34:26PM +0200, hch@lst.de wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 18, 2019 at 09:41:40AM +0200, hch@lst.de wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 18, 2019 at 09:11:28AM +0200, hch@lst.de wrote:
> > > > The kernel log shows the following when the mount fails:
> > >
> > > Is it always that same message? I'll see if I can reproduce it,
> > > but I won't have that much memory to spare to create fake pmem,
> > > hope this also works with a single device and/or less memory..
> >
> > I've reproduced a similar ASSERT with a small pmem device, so I hope
> > I can debug the issue locally now.
>
> So I can also reproduce the same issue with the ramdisk driver, but not
> with any other 4k sector size device (nvmet, scsi target, scsi_debug,
> loop). Which made me wonder if there is some issue about the memory
> passed in, and indeed just switching to plain vmalloc vs the XFS
> kmem_alloc_large wrapper that either uses kmalloc or vmalloc fixes
> the issue for me. I don't really understand why yet, maybe I need to
> dig out alignment testing patches.
>
> diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_recover.c b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_recover.c
> index 13d1d3e95b88..918ad3b884a7 100644
> --- a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_recover.c
> +++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_recover.c
> @@ -125,7 +125,7 @@ xlog_alloc_buffer(
> if (nbblks > 1 && log->l_sectBBsize > 1)
> nbblks += log->l_sectBBsize;
> nbblks = round_up(nbblks, log->l_sectBBsize);
> - return kmem_alloc_large(BBTOB(nbblks), KM_MAYFAIL);
> + return vmalloc(BBTOB(nbblks));
> }

After thinking on this for a bit, I suspect the better thing to do
here is add a KM_ALIGNED flag to the allocation, so if the internal
kmem_alloc() returns an unaligned pointer we free it and fall
through to vmalloc() to get a properly aligned pointer....

That way none of the other interfaces have to change, and we can
then use kmem_alloc_large() everywhere we allocate buffers for IO.
And we don't need new infrastructure just to support these debug
configurations, either.

Actually, kmem_alloc_io() might be a better idea - keep the aligned
flag internal to the kmem code. Seems like a pretty simple solution
to the entire problem we have here...

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com