linux-ext4 - Re: [BUG] aborted ext4 leads to inifinity loop in balance_dirty

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Message-ID: <4EBA39A4.3040708@sx.jp.nec.com>
Date:	Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:28:20 +0900
From:	Kazuya Mio <k-mio@...jp.nec.com>
To:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
CC:	ext4 <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>, Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>,
	Andreas Dilger <adilger@...ger.ca>
Subject: Re: [BUG] aborted ext4 leads to inifinity loop in balance_dirty_pages

2011/11/08 9:03, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Fri 28-10-11 14:34:31, Kazuya Mio wrote:
>> 2011/10/25 22:40, Jan Kara wrote:
>>>   Please no. Generally this boils down to what do we do with dirty data
>>> when there's error in writing them out. Currently we just throw them away
>>> (e.g. in media error case) but I don't think that's a generally good thing
>>> because e.g. admin may want to copy the data to other working storage or
>>> so. So I think we should rather keep the data and provide a mechanism for
>>> userspace to ask kernel to get rid of the data (so that we don't eventually
>>> run OOM).
>>
>> I see. I agree with you.
>>
>>>> Do you have any ideas?
>>>   So the question is what would you like to achieve. If you just want to
>>> unblock a thread then a solution would be to make a thread at
>>> balance_dirty_pages() killable. If generally you want to get rid of dirty
>>> memory, then I don't have a really good answer but throwing dirty data away
>>> seems like a bad answer to me.
>>
>> The problem is that we cannot unmount the corrupted filesystem due to
>> un-killable dd process. We must bring down the system to resume the service
>> with no dirty pages. I think it is important for the service continuity
>> to be able to kill the thread handling in balance_dirty_pages().
>    OK, attached are two patches based on latest Linus's tree that should
> make your task killable. Can you test them?

I'm trying to reproduce now, but it's hard. Could you wait a few days?
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