Re: How to freeze 2.0.31 pre7 :(

Bill Hawes (whawes@star.net)
Fri, 22 Aug 1997 13:05:19 -0400

Dietmar Kling wrote:

> Writing inode tables: done
> Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
> minitiger:/dos/a # mount -t ext2 -o loop empty_file /dos/c
> minitiger:/dos/a # cd /dos/c
> minitiger:/dos/c # dir
> total 12
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 Aug 22 13:12 lost+found/
> minitiger:/dos/c # cd /
> minitiger:/ # find . -mount | cpio -pvum /dos/c
>
> after copying ca 5% the kernel solidly (i tried it 3 times) freezes :(
> (and copying the whole would be a size of ca 500 MB .-> 150 MB smaller than filesize of empty_file)

Unfortunately this looks like a loop device too-many-dirty-buffers
deadlock. In spite of the numerous kludges in the buffer code to
attempt to circumvent such deadlocks, there appear to be cases that
aren't covered.

I would very much like to see a loop device that operated only
synchronously, so that there were _never_ any dirty loop device buffers.

Regards,
Bill