Re: 2.6.22-rc5: pdflush oops under heavy disk load

["Jay L. T. Cornwall" <jay@esuna.co.uk>]

Jay Cliburn wrote:

>> The common factor here seems to be the buffer_head circular list
>> leading to invalid pointers in bh->b_this_page.
>>
>> I'm beginning to suspect the Attansic L1 Gigabit Etherner driver
>> (marked as EXPERIMENTAL in 2.6.22-rc5). I can't reproduce these
>> panics on disk-to-disk copies or SCP across the localhost interface.
>> However, SCP from a server onto either of two different HDDs hits
>> these oopses fairly quickly.

> How much RAM is installed in your machine?  If it's 4GB or more, does
> your problem go away if you boot with mem=3000M?

Intriguing. Yes, this machine has 4GB of RAM. If I boot with mem=3000M
the problem does indeed go away - I can't induce an oops even after
transferring tens of GB across the interface.

I'm not sure I follow why that would be the case, except that it relates
to pci_map_page behaviour. But I guess you have an inkling?

-- 
Jay L. T. Cornwall, http://www.esuna.co.uk/~jay/
PhD Student
Imperial College London