Re: Checkin 7404ad3b6d04efbd918e9e2e776bf560fbedf47d breaks booton KVM

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Tue Oct 14 2008 - 14:05:24 EST


James Bottomley wrote:

:040000 040000 98fc7ae95211b8d16e2e8ca46997be660ad9ba93 2d35d0a2b6232411b840a9ccf6a52b946172566e M drivers

However, simply reverting this commit caused a panic on boot (not entirely surprising.)

Actually, it is surprising. That patch takes the default arithmetic for
calculating the disk size out of sd and uses a routine to do it more
efficiently in lib/string_helpers.c

So there are two problems: Why does it panic on revert (could you post
the oops) and what does kvm object to in string_get_size ... it's a
fairly innocuous routine as I read it ... your symptoms sound like the
for loop isn't terminating.


Looks like it's trying to print a zero. I made a diff to print out the raw numbers, and did indeed get zero.

Now, *why* it is printing a zero is another matter (as is why using ffz() instead of ilog2() there...). Some quick investigation showed that sdkp->capacity is a 32-bit quantity in this configuration, and shifting it left by 9 of course ends up with zero; being a virtual disk, it's an exact power of two.

Still, it is bad that string_get_size() hangs on passing zero.

The spinlock lockup is still happening, so I'm assuming it is an unrelated bug that was masked by the string_get_size issue.

Patch series will follow shortly.

-hpa
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