Bug 111068

Summary:	Kernel hangs under heavy network IO doing dd over proprietary filesystem
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Abraham R Matthews <amatthews>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Arjan van de Ven <arjanv>
Status:	CLOSED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	Brian Brock <bbrock>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	7.3	CC:	riel
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2006-02-21 19:00:12 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Abraham R Matthews 2003-11-26 22:09:06 UTC

Description of problem:
However in do_try_to_free_pages() (mm/vmscan.c) there is no call
to refill_freelist(). It looks like the call to refill_freelist()
was mistakenly removed when do_try_to_free_pages() cloned into
do_try_to_free_pages_kswapd(). (Maybe refill_freelist() was to be
removed in do_try_to_free_pages_kswapd() ?).

FWIW, in 2.4.18-19.7.x there is a call to refill_freelist() from
do_try_to_free_pages().

This results in a kernel hang when the workload recycles lots of
pages.

When we added the missing call to refill_freelist() in
do_try_to_free_pages(), the test was succesfull and the kernel did
not hang.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
kernel-smp-2.4.20-20.7

How reproducible:
Every time.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install Panasas proprietary filesystem and mount network based 
filesystem.
2. Repeatedly do dd and cp to/from Panasas filesystem and 
from/to /dev/null.
3. Watch free pages dwindle till the kernel hangs.
  
Actual results:
Kernel is not responsive. Can ping the host, but can not ssh to it.
No response to keyboard. Does respond to sysrq magic keys.

Expected results:


Additional info:
Adding refill_freelist() in do_try_to_free_pages()(mm/vmscan.c:879)
ensured that there were free pages and the test completed.

Comment 1 Arjan van de Ven 2003-11-26 22:10:31 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 78616 ***

Comment 2 Red Hat Bugzilla 2006-02-21 19:00:12 UTC

Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.