| Re: [PATCH] remove BUG() in possible but rare condition [message #45900 is a reply to message #45893] |
Wed, 11 April 2012 20:26   |
akpm
Messages: 224
Registered: March 2007
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Senior Member |
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On Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:10:24 -0300
Glauber Costa <glommer@parallels.com> wrote:
> While stressing the kernel with with failing allocations today,
> I hit the following chain of events:
>
> alloc_page_buffers():
>
> bh = alloc_buffer_head(GFP_NOFS);
> if (!bh)
> goto no_grow; <= path taken
>
> grow_dev_page():
> bh = alloc_page_buffers(page, size, 0);
> if (!bh)
> goto failed; <= taken, consequence of the above
>
> and then the failed path BUG()s the kernel.
>
> The failure is inserted a litte bit artificially, but even then,
> I see no reason why it should be deemed impossible in a real box.
>
> Even though this is not a condition that we expect to see
> around every time, failed allocations are expected to be handled,
> and BUG() sounds just too much. As a matter of fact, grow_dev_page()
> can return NULL just fine in other circumstances, so I propose we just
> remove it, then.
>
> Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <glommer@parallels.com>
> CC: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
> CC: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
> ---
> fs/buffer.c | 1 -
> 1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/fs/buffer.c b/fs/buffer.c
> index 36d6665..351e18e 100644
> --- a/fs/buffer.c
> +++ b/fs/buffer.c
> @@ -985,7 +985,6 @@ grow_dev_page(struct block_device *bdev, sector_t block,
> return page;
>
> failed:
> - BUG();
> unlock_page(page);
> page_cache_release(page);
> return NULL;
Cute.
AFAICT what happened was that in my April 2002 rewrite of this code I
put a non-fatal buffer_error() warning in that case to tell us that
something bad happened.
Years later we removed the temporary buffer_error() and mistakenly
replaced that warning with a BUG(). Only it *can* happen.
We can remove the BUG() and fix up callers, or we can pass retry=1 into
alloc_page_buffers(), so grow_dev_page() "cannot fail". Immortal
functions are a silly fiction, so we should remove the BUG() and fix up
callers.
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