From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3D6D5128.9EE6DFDD@zip.com.au> Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 15:39:36 -0700 From: Andrew Morton MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: MM patches against 2.5.31 References: <3D644C70.6D100EA5@zip.com.au> <3D6D3AA4.31A4AD3A@zip.com.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Daniel Phillips Cc: Christian Ehrhardt , lkml , "linux-mm@kvack.org" List-ID: Daniel Phillips wrote: > > ... > So there's no question that the race is lurking in 2.4. I noticed several > more paths besides the one above that look suspicious as well. The bottom > line is, 2.4 needs a fix along the lines of my suggestion or Christian's, > something that can actually be proved. > > It's a wonder that this problem manifests so rarely in practice. I sort-of glanced through the 2.4 paths and it appears that in all of the places where it could do a page_cache_get/release, that would never happen because of other parts of the page state. Like: it can't be in pagecache, so we won't run writepage, and it can't have buffers, so we won't run try_to_release_page(). Of course, I might have missed a path. And, well, generally: ugh. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/