On Tue 23-10-12 14:56:36, Andrew Morton wrote: > On Tue, 23 Oct 2012 12:21:53 +0200 > Jan Kara wrote: > > > > That seems a fairly serious problem. To which kernel version(s) should > > > we apply the fix? > > Well, XFS will crash starting from 2.6.36 kernel where the assertion was > > added. Previously XFS just silently added buffers (as other filesystems do > > it) and wrote / redirtied the page (unnecessarily). So looking into > > maintained -stable branches I think pushing the patch to -stable from 3.0 > > on should be enough. > > OK, thanks, I made it so. > > > > > diff --git a/mm/rmap.c b/mm/rmap.c > > > > > > It's a bit surprising that none of the added comments mention the s390 > > > pte-dirtying oddity. I don't see an obvious place to mention this, but > > > I for one didn't know about this and it would be good if we could > > > capture the info _somewhere_? > > As Hugh says, the comment before page_test_and_clear_dirty() is somewhat > > updated. But do you mean recording somewhere the catch that s390 HW dirty > > bit gets set also whenever we write to a page from kernel? > > Yes, this. It's surprising behaviour which we may trip over again, so > how do we inform developers about it? > > > I guess we could > > add that also to the comment before page_test_and_clear_dirty() in > > page_remove_rmap() and also before definition of > > page_test_and_clear_dirty(). So most people that will add / remove these > > calls will be warned. OK? > > Sounds good, thanks. OK, the patch is attached. As Martin says, it may be obsolete soon but just in case Martin's patch set gets delayed... Honza -- Jan Kara SUSE Labs, CR