Re: 2.6.34-rc3: simple du (on a big xfs tree) triggers oom killer [bisected: 57817c68229984818fea9e614d6f95249c3fb098]

["Hans-Peter Jansen" <hpj@urpla.net>]

On Saturday 24 April 2010, 23:23:20 Emmanuel Florac wrote:
> Le Sat, 24 Apr 2010 18:44:22 +0200 vous écriviez:
> > Greg, you might search for a server using xfs filesystems and and a
> > i586 kernel >= 2.6.33, (2.6.32.11 of SLE11-SP1 will serve as well),
> > log in as an ordinary user, do a "du" on /usr, and wait for the other
> > users screaming...
>
> I did precisely that, and didn't notice anything special (du on kernel
> source tree) kernel 2.6.32.11, deadline scheduler, 7 drives RAID-6
> array, 8GB RAM.

I guess, you're not on this specific openSUSE git version of 2.6.32.11 (e.g. 
the preparation for SP1 of SLE11), which, as usual, carries a lot of stuff 
from later kernels. The offending patch was included in linux-2.6.33 
between -rc4 and -rc5:

Committer
Alex Elder<aelder@sgi.com>
Author
Dave Chinner<david@fromorbit.com>
Author date
11.01.10 00:51
Parent
xfs: Avoid inodes in reclaim when flushing from inode cache
Child
xfs: Remove inode iolock held check during allocation
Branch
master origin (Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/...) 
Branch
2.6.33.1 (Linux 2.6.33) 
Follows
v2.6.33-rc4 (Linux 2.6.33-rc4)
Precedes
v2.6.33-rc5 (Linux 2.6.33-rc5)

Cheers,
Pete