On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, Mike Galbraith wrote:
>
> I keep running into a deadlock with it looping forever trying to
> free memory, triggered by blocking in getblk->refill_freelist->..
> try_to_free_buffers->sync_page_buffers->zzzzz (kflushd runs forever).
>
> The below seems to cure it. Without this, I can lock my box without
> much effort. I beat on this pretty hard with no ill effects noted.
This is exactly the kind of patch that the loopback device has always
needed, and is exactly the reason why I would prefer to kill loopback as
soon as possible.
Either loopback is a block device driver, or it isn't. If it is, then it
has absolutely no reason to start messing with fs/buffers.c and add
special case logic for itself. And if it isn't, then the whole point of
loopback is gone.
I'm inclined to mark loopback DANGEROUS because there apparently still
isn't a maintainer for it. And the next person who suggests using it
instead of a real filesystem (ramfs, cramfs, JFFS) should be forced to
actually make it work right first!
Linus
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:00:34 EST