Re: frequent softlockups with 3.10rc6.

[Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>]

On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 12:05:31PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 03:23:48PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > So with that patch, those two boxes have now been fuzzing away for
> > > over 24hrs without seeing that specific sync related bug.
> > 
> > Ok, so at least that confirms that yes, the problem is the excessive
> > contention on inode_sb_list_lock.
> > 
> > Ugh. There's no way we can do that patch by DaveC for 3.10. Not only
> > is it scary, Andi pointed out that it's actively buggy and will miss
> > inodes that need writeback due to moving things to private lists.
> 
> Right - it was just a quick hack for proof of concept... :)
> 
> > So I suspect we'll have to do 3.10 with this starvation issue in
> > place, and mark for stable backporting whatever eventual fix we find.
> 
> I can reproduce the contention problem on both 3.8 and 3.9 kernels,
> so this isn't a recent regression, and as such it's likely I'll be
> able to reproduce it on any kernel since the global inode_lock
> breakup was done back in 2.6.38.

Just as a data point - I just found a machine running a 3.4 kernel
and I can reproduce the inode_sb_list_lock contention problem on it,
too. It's definitely not a new problem...

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com