Re: [stable] [PATCH] - fix oops in sysfs_readdir

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

On Mon, 21 May 2007 13:11:21 -0500
Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com> wrote:

> This is a non-ida backport of Tejun's patch in -mm at:
> ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.22-rc1/2.6.22-rc1-mm1/broken-out/gregkh-driver-sysfs-allocate-inode-number-using-ida.patch
> for the 2.6.16 -stable tree - it follows the same scheme of using s_ino to safely
> store & retrieve the inode number of sysfs entries for use in sysfs_readdir,
> but uses a brain-dead-simple inode nr allocator rather than ida, which would
> bring along a lot of newer, more complex code.
> 
> No, this doesn't guarantee uniqueness of sysfs inode numbers, but then
> the code in -stable today doesn't either - and with this change, at least
> it shouldn't oops.

So I'm sitting here whether to commend this patch to google kernel maintainers
for 2.6.18 backport, but I realise I don't know what it does.  And I don't know
if it fixes the reclaim-time oopses they were intermittently seeing, or if it
fixes something else and if so what that is.

Sigh.  Better changelogs, please.