block: replace __getblk_slow misfix by grow_dev_page fix
Commit 91f68c89d8f3 ("block: fix infinite loop in __getblk_slow")
is not good: a successful call to grow_buffers() cannot guarantee
that the page won't be reclaimed before the immediate next call to
__find_get_block(), which is why there was always a loop there.
Yesterday I got "EXT4-fs error (device loop0): __ext4_get_inode_loc:3595:
inode #19278: block 664: comm cc1: unable to read itable block" on console,
which pointed to this commit.
I've been trying to bisect for weeks, why kbuild-on-ext4-on-loop-on-tmpfs
sometimes fails from a missing header file, under memory pressure on
ppc G5. I've never seen this on x86, and I've never seen it on 3.5-rc7
itself, despite that commit being in there: bisection pointed to an
irrelevant pinctrl merge, but hard to tell when failure takes between
18 minutes and 38 hours (but so far it's happened quicker on 3.6-rc2).
(I've since found such __ext4_get_inode_loc errors in /var/log/messages
from previous weeks: why the message never appeared on console until
yesterday morning is a mystery for another day.)
Revert 91f68c89d8f3, restoring __getblk_slow() to how it was (plus
a checkpatch nitfix). Simplify the interface between grow_buffers()
and grow_dev_page(), and avoid the infinite loop beyond end of device
by instead checking init_page_buffers()'s end_block there (I presume
that's more efficient than a repeated call to blkdev_max_block()),
returning -ENXIO to __getblk_slow() in that case.
And remove akpm's ten-year-old "__getblk() cannot fail ... weird"
comment, but that is worrying: are all users of __getblk() really
now prepared for a NULL bh beyond end of device, or will some oops??
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # 3.0 3.2 3.4 3.5
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
1 file changed