1. Jan 27, 2007
    • Linus Torvalds's avatar
      Resurrect 'try_to_free_buffers()' VM hackery · ecdfc978
      Linus Torvalds authored
      It's not pretty, but it appears that ext3 with data=journal will clean
      pages without ever actually telling the VM that they are clean.  This,
      in turn, will result in the VM (and balance_dirty_pages() in particular)
      to never realize that the pages got cleaned, and wait forever for an
      event that already happened.
      
      Technically, this seems to be a problem with ext3 itself, but it used to
      be hidden by 'try_to_free_buffers()' noticing this situation on its own,
      and just working around the filesystem problem.
      
      This commit re-instates that hack, in order to avoid a regression for
      the 2.6.20 release. This fixes bugzilla 7844:
      
      	http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7844
      
      
      
      Peter Zijlstra points out that we should probably retain the debugging
      code that this removes from cancel_dirty_page(), and I agree, but for
      the imminent release we might as well just silence the warning too
      (since it's not a new bug: anything that triggers that warning has been
      around forever).
      
      Acked-by: default avatarRandy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
      Acked-by: default avatarJens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
      Acked-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
      Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      ecdfc978
  2. Jan 26, 2007
  3. Jan 25, 2007
  4. Jan 24, 2007