Re: Linux 2.4.34-pre3

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Willy Tarreau wrote:
> Hello !
> 
> I've been a little bit silent and quite busy too. As announced with -pre2,
> here comes -pre3 with only GCC4 fixes. Other fixes I received are minor
> and can wait for -pre4. I really want people to test -pre3 without adding
> any noise to the test. There should be *no* regression at all with existing
> compilers.
> 
> Gcc 4.1 is known to build x86, x86_64, ppc, sparc64, and sparc. Only sparc
> has received no testing yet, while sparc64 is OK. It is possible that some
> sparc/sparc64 drivers have not been caught because of undetected options
> combinations (Davem CC'd for any possible advice on this mater). Status
> for other archs is unknown but at least must not be affected for existing
> setups.
> 
> You will notice that most of the changes below appear under my name while
> I do not deserve any credit for the changes. It is just because I've cut
> all the fixes to sort them, and committed them myself individually. But
> the real work has been done by Mikael.
> 
> We have worked *very* carefully on this merge, and we hope to get all
> possible feedback. People who encounter build problems on archs listed
> above are free to report them, possibly with the fix. When providing a
> fix, *please* provide the whole error output in the commit message so
> that we can track what has been fixed. People who want to include support
> for other archs will have to provide patches, as (at least for me) we
> are not equipped to build on other archs (except for alpha when my RAM
> arrives).
> 
> I plan to wait up to the end of this month before providing -pre4 if there
> is no feedback. Important fixes will be subject to another -stable release
> anyway, so it's safe to wait for feedback here.

I wonder if 2.4 doesn't need the memory ordering fix to prevent pagecache
corruption in reclaim? (http://www.gatago.com/linux/kernel/14682626.html)

What would need to be done is to test page_count before testing PageDirty,
and putting an smp_rmb between the two.

-- 
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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