linux-kernel - Important regression with XFS update for 2.6.24-rc6

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Message-ID: <20071218112804.GA3069@localhost.localdomain>
Date:	Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:28:04 +0100
From:	Damien Wyart <damien.wyart@...e.fr>
To:	David Chinner <dgc@....com>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Lachlan McIlroy <lachlan@....com>,
	Peter Leckie <pleckie@....com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:	linux-xfs@....sgi.com, LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Important regression with XFS update for 2.6.24-rc6

Hello,

As a follow-up to
<http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=119796120524618&w=2> (LKML seems
down right now so I am not linking to it), I have detected an important
problem with these two patches: after applying them by hand (downloaded
them raw from SGI's gitweb) on top of 2.6.24-rc5-git5 (they have not yet
been pulled into mainline by Linux as of this morning) for testing
purposes, I noticed upon reboot that "ls -l" on directories with many
files and subdirectories (around 5000 entries) takes several hundreds of
MB in RAM and then dies with "memory exhausted" error.

I also noticed that ldconfig takes a lot of time to complete, and
firefox seems also to eat much more memory than usual. Reverting the two
patches (going back to vanilla rc5-git5) makes these problems go away.
I am not able to test right now if only one of the patches is bogus or
if both of them are concerned.

As the symptoms are easy to reproduce, I guess this is some kind of
brown paper bag bug and will be easy for XFS experts to spot.

Best,

-- 
Damien Wyart
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