Re: [PATCH] mm: fix page_mkclean_one (was: 2.6.19 file content corruption on ext3)

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxx> [2006-12-20 09:35]:
Can you remind us:
- your ARM is UP, right? Do you have PREEMPT on?

It's UP and PREEMPT is not set. I used 2.6.19 plus the patch that has
been posted.

- This is probably a stupid question, but you did make sure that the
database was ok (with some rebuild command) and that you didn't have
preexisting corruption?

Yes, my test case is to install Debian on the ARM machine so the
database is created fresh. While the corruption always triggers
during a fresh installation, it's much harder to see in a running
system. Some people see it on their system but I haven't found a 100%
working recipe to reproduce it yet given a working system; doing a new
installation seems to trigger it all the time though.

Anyway, the page_mkclean_one() fixes (along with _most_ things we've
looked at) shouldn't matter on UP, at least certainly not without
PREEMPT.

Hmm. So what about UP without PREEMPT then...

Maybe the following information is helpful in some way: remember how I
said that we have applied 6 mm patches to 2.6.18 in Debian? According
to Gordon Farquharson, who's helping me a great deal with testing
installation on this ARM machine (Linksys NSLU2), the corruption
doesn't always show up when you only apply
mm-tracking-shared-dirty-pages.patch to 2.6.18 but it shows up all the
time with all six patches applied. As a reminder, the 6 patches we
apply are:

mm-tracking-shared-dirty-pages.patch
mm-balance-dirty-pages.patch
mm-optimize-mprotect.patch
mm-install_page-cleanup.patch
mm-do_wp_page-fixup.patch
mm-msync-cleanup.patch

--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/