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Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:36:56 +1100 From: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au> To: Richard Purdie <richard@...nedhand.com> CC: kernel list <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...l.org>, Hugh Dickins <hugh@...itas.com> Subject: Re: [PATCH, RFC/T] Fix handling of write failures to swap devices Richard Purdie wrote: > On Sat, 2006-10-28 at 22:10 +1000, Nick Piggin wrote: >>That isn't your only problem though, and we simply don't want to do >>this (potentially expensive) unusing from interrupt context. Noting >>the error and dealing with it in process context I think is the best >>way to do it. > > > The reasoning was that this circumstance should be extremely rare. If it > happens, we have a hardware problem. Recovering from that hardware > problem gracefully is more important than a slightly longer interrupt. > But yes, process context would be nicer, *if* we can find a way to do > it. Also note that the current code *should* "gracefully" handle the failure. In that, it will not reclaim the page on a write error, so it isn't going to cause a data loss... It's just that it currently results in unswappable pages. Handling it more gracefully by allowing the page to be retried with another swap entry is OK I guess, but given the added complexity, I'm not even sure it is worthwhile. Perhaps we should just do the ClearPageError in the try_to_unuse path, because the sysadmin should take down that swap device on failure. So if a new device is added, we want to be able to unpin the failed pages. -- SUSE Labs, Novell Inc. Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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