Re: 2.6.30-rc6: Reported regressions from 2.6.29

Stefan Richter
2009-05-17T12:59:07Z

Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Sunday 17 May 2009, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>> * Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl> wrote:
>>> Bug-Entry : http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13321
>>> Subject : kernel crash with NULL pointer when boot
>>> Submitter : Martin Bammer <mrb74@gmx.at>
>>> Date : 2009-05-16 12:37 (1 days old)
>>> References : http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/5/16/100
>> that crash is in reiserfs_for_each_xattr(), during sys_unlink()'s
>> xattr teardown.
>>
>> There's been a good deal of reiserfs changes in this cycle - some
>> touch the xattr code as well. Some of them fairly late in the cycle,

(Also, the bug is reportedly a post -rc5 regression.)

>> in the last two weeks:
>>
>> earth4:~/tip> gll v2.6.29..linus --since=two-weeks-ago fs/reiserfs/
>> 2a32ceb: Fix races around the access to ->s_options
>> 677c9b2: reiserfs: remove privroot hiding in lookup
>> b82bb72: reiserfs: dont associate security.* with xattr files
>> ab17c4f: reiserfs: fixup xattr_root caching
>> edcc37a: Always lookup priv_root on reiserfs mount and keep it
>> 5a6059c: reiserfs: Expand i_mutex to enclose lookup_one_len
>>
>> Martin, you could try a blind revert of say ... ab17c4f, which looks
>> the most suspect and which is also a rather large commit.
>>
>> Or/and you could try a bisect - perhaps accelerated via:
>>
>> git bisect start fs/reiserfs/
>
> I think there's a fix already for this in the works, but it hasn't been merged
> yet. It looks like Jeff has just posted some reiserfs fixes. :-)

I'd say Martin should try Jeff's pending patches before a revert or
before starting a bisection. Either apply them from
http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/5/17/6, or pull from
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs-2.6.git for-next
or wait for them to appear in Linus' tree...

I for one didn't test the post v2.6.30-rc5 changes to reiserfs, but I
did try them _together_ with the four pending patches on a system with
reiserfs root filesystem and extended attributes disabled in the config.
Everything is fine here after almost a week uptime.
--
Stefan Richter
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