ext3-0.9.15 against linux-2.4.14

Andrew Morton (akpm@zip.com.au)
Tue, 06 Nov 2001 01:20:44 -0800


Download details and documentation are at

http://www.uow.edu.au/~andrewm/linux/ext3/

Changes since ext3-0.9.13 (which was against linux-2.4.13):

- Fixed a null-pointer dereference oops which could hit on
SMP machines. This fix was applied to 2.4.12-ac6, but the
oops has never been reported against -ac kernels.

- Large amounts of developer debug code has been removed. This
will now be maintained separately.

- There is an interaction failure between ext3 and the current
Extended Attributes and Access Control Lists patch which leads
to crashes under heavy load on SMP. This is possibly due to
a subtle API change between ext3 in 2.2 and 2.4 kernels (ie: I
broke it). On the to-do list.

- For a long time, the ext3 patch has used a semaphore in the core
kernel to prevent concurrent pagein and truncate of the same
file. This was to prevent a race wherein the paging-in task
would wake up after the truncate and would instantiate a page
in the process's page tables which had attached buffers. This
leads to a BUG() if the swapout code tries to swap the page out.

This semaphore has been removed. The swapout code has been altered
to simply detect and ignore these pages.

This is an incredibly obscure and hard-to-hit situation. The testcase
which used to trigger it can no longer do so. So if anyone sees the
message "try_to_swap_out: page has buffers!", please shout out.

There are no plans to remove this semaphore from -ac kernels,
unless Alan wants it that way.

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