Re: Compatibility issue with 2.2.19pre7

Russell King (rmk@arm.linux.org.uk)
Thu, 11 Jan 2001 07:34:01 +0000 (GMT)


Andrea Arcangeli writes:
> However I'd _love_ to see the EIP where you get the fault, I currently don't
> see the line of code that is crashing your ARM and I know this code doesn't
> segfault on ARM.

Examine nlm_lookup_file() and the usage of fh->fh_dev and fh->fh_ino.
What happens is that in that dprintk fh_dev and fh_ino contain garbage
and as such, the nlm_lookup_file fails (since it doesn't refer to a valid
device and inode pair). Therefore locking does not work.

Note: I've never said that it crashes. I've only said that NFS locking
does not work.

> > And yes, APIs shouldn't break in a major kernel release. Its a shame some
> > API broke in 2.2.18.
>
> What broke in 2.2.18?

The API changed:

struct nfs_mount_data {
int version; /* 1 */
int fd; /* 1 */
- struct nfs_fh root; /* 1 */
+ struct nfs2_fh old_root; /* 1 */
int flags; /* 1 */
int rsize; /* 1 */
int wsize; /* 1 */
@@ -35,6 +42,7 @@
char hostname[256]; /* 1 */
int namlen; /* 2 */
unsigned int bsize; /* 3 */
+ struct nfs_fh root; /* 4 */
};

which then caused this breakage. Therefore, I still propose my original
patch as a bug fix against something that appears to be brand new in
design.

Anyway, changing it back will break the API on ARM, so either way API
breakage WILL happen at some point. The real question is which is better:

1. Yucky code in the NFS layers to copy a nfs_fh from userspace to kernel
space, translating it into something sane.
2. Yucky code in the NFS layers to manually handle the nfs_fh to knfs_fh
translation.
3. Accept the breakage of a *brand new* API in 2.2.18 and suffer zero
yucky code.
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