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  1. Jan 07, 2006
    • Badari Pulavarty's avatar
      [PATCH] madvise(MADV_REMOVE): remove pages from tmpfs shm backing store · f6b3ec23
      Badari Pulavarty authored 
      

Here is the patch to implement madvise(MADV_REMOVE) - which frees up a
given range of pages & its associated backing store.  Current
implementation supports only shmfs/tmpfs and other filesystems return
-ENOSYS.

"Some app allocates large tmpfs files, then when some task quits and some
client disconnect, some memory can be released.  However the only way to
release tmpfs-swap is to MADV_REMOVE". - Andrea Arcangeli

Databases want to use this feature to drop a section of their bufferpool
(shared memory segments) - without writing back to disk/swap space.

This feature is also useful for supporting hot-plug memory on UML.

Concerns raised by Andrew Morton:

- "We have no plan for holepunching!  If we _do_ have such a plan (or
  might in the future) then what would the API look like?  I think
  sys_holepunch(fd, start, len), so we should start out with that."

- Using madvise is very weird, because people will ask "why do I need to
  mmap my file before I can stick a hole in it?"

- None of the other madvise operations call into the filesystem in this
  manner.  A broad question is: is this capability an MM operation or a
  filesytem operation?  truncate, for example, is a filesystem operation
  which sometimes has MM side-effects.  madvise is an mm operation and with
  this patch, it gains FS side-effects, only they're really, really
  significant ones."

Comments:

- Andrea suggested the fs operation too but then it's more efficient to
  have it as a mm operation with fs side effects, because they don't
  immediatly know fd and physical offset of the range.  It's possible to
  fixup in userland and to use the fs operation but it's more expensive,
  the vmas are already in the kernel and we can use them.

Short term plan &  Future Direction:

- We seem to need this interface only for shmfs/tmpfs files in the short
  term.  We have to add hooks into the filesystem for correctness and
  completeness.  This is what this patch does.

- In the future, plan is to support both fs and mmap apis also.  This
  also involves (other) filesystem specific functions to be implemented.

- Current patch doesn't support VM_NONLINEAR - which can be addressed in
  the future.

Signed-off-by: default avatarBadari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk-manpages@gmx.net>
Cc: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      f6b3ec23
    • Hans Reiser's avatar
      [PATCH] reiser4: vfs: add truncate_inode_pages_range() · d7339071
      Hans Reiser authored 
      

This patch makes truncate_inode_pages_range from truncate_inode_pages.
truncate_inode_pages became a one-liner call to truncate_inode_pages_range.

Reiser4 needs truncate_inode_pages_ranges because it tries to keep
correspondence between existences of metadata pointing to data pages and pages
to which those metadata point to.  So, when metadata of certain part of file
is removed from filesystem tree, only pages of corresponding range are to be
truncated.

(Needed by the madvise(MADV_REMOVE) patch)

Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      d7339071
    • Andy Whitcroft's avatar
      [PATCH] memhotplug: register_memory should be global · 900b2b46
      Andy Whitcroft authored 
      

register_memory is global and declared so in linux/memory.h.  Update the
HOTPLUG specific definition to match.  This fixes a compile warning when
HOTPLUG is enabled.

Signed-off-by: default avatarAndy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      900b2b46
    • Andy Whitcroft's avatar
      [PATCH] memhotplug: register_ and unregister_memory_notifier should be global · 98a38ebd
      Andy Whitcroft authored 
      

Both register_memory_notifer and unregister_memory_notifier are global and
declared so in linux/memory.h.  Update the HOTPLUG specific definitions to
match.  This fixes a compile warning when HOTPLUG is enabled.

Signed-off-by: default avatarAndy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      98a38ebd
    • Andy Whitcroft's avatar
      [PATCH] memhotplug: __add_section remove unused pgdat definition · 5ac24eef
      Andy Whitcroft authored 
      

__add_section defines an unused pointer to the zones pgdat.  Remove this
definition.  This fixes a compile warning.

Signed-off-by: default avatarAndy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      5ac24eef
    • Paul Jackson's avatar
      [PATCH] mm: fix __alloc_pages cpuset ALLOC_* flags · 47f3a867
      Paul Jackson authored 
      

Two changes to the setting of the ALLOC_CPUSET flag in
mm/page_alloc.c:__alloc_pages()

- A bug fix - the "ignoring mins" case should not be honoring ALLOC_CPUSET.
  This case of all cases, since it is handling a request that will free up
  more memory than is asked for (exiting tasks, e.g.) should be allowed to
  escape cpuset constraints when memory is tight.

- A logic change to make it simpler.  Honor cpusets even on GFP_ATOMIC
  (!wait) requests.  With this, cpuset confinement applies to all requests
  except ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS, so that in a subsequent cleanup patch, I can
  remove the ALLOC_CPUSET flag entirely.  Since I don't know any real reason
  this logic has to be either way, I am choosing the path of the simplest
  code.

Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      47f3a867
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] swsusp: resume_store() retval fix · a576219a
      Andrew Morton authored 
      

- This function returns -EINVAL all the time.  Fix.

- Decruftify it a bit too.

- Writing to it doesn't seem to do what it's suppoed to do.

Cc: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      a576219a
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] alpha: dma_map_page() fix · 817c41d7
      Andrew Morton authored 
      

Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru>
Cc: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      817c41d7
    • NeilBrown's avatar
      [PATCH] knfsd: fix hash function for IP addresses on 64bit little-endian machines. · 1f1e030b
      NeilBrown authored 
      

The hash.h hash_long function, when used on a 64 bit machine, ignores many
of the middle-order bits.  (The prime chosen it too bit-sparse).

IP addresses for clients of an NFS server are very likely to differ only in
the low-order bits.  As addresses are stored in network-byte-order, these
bits become middle-order bits in a little-endian 64bit 'long', and so do
not contribute to the hash.  Thus you can have the situation where all
clients appear on one hash chain.

So, until hash_long is fixed (or maybe forever), us a hash function that
works well on IP addresses - xor the bytes together.

Thanks to "Iozone" <capps@iozone.org> for identifying this problem.

Cc: "Iozone" <capps@iozone.org>

Signed-off-by: default avatarNeil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      1f1e030b
    • Herbert Xu's avatar
      [PATCH] nbd: fix TX/RX race condition · 4b2f0260
      Herbert Xu authored 
      

Janos Haar of First NetCenter Bt.  reported numerous crashes involving the
NBD driver.  With his help, this was tracked down to bogus bio vectors
which in turn was the result of a race condition between the
receive/transmit routines in the NBD driver.

The bug manifests itself like this:

CPU0				CPU1
do_nbd_request
	add req to queuelist
	nbd_send_request
		send req head
		for each bio
			kmap
			send
				nbd_read_stat
					nbd_find_request
					nbd_end_request
			kunmap

When CPU1 finishes nbd_end_request, the request and all its associated
bio's are freed.  So when CPU0 calls kunmap whose argument is derived from
the last bio, it may crash.

Under normal circumstances, the race occurs only on the last bio.  However,
if an error is encountered on the remote NBD server (such as an incorrect
magic number in the request), or if there were a bug in the server, it is
possible for the nbd_end_request to occur any time after the request's
addition to the queuelist.

The following patch fixes this problem by making sure that requests are not
added to the queuelist until after they have been completed transmission.

In order for the receiving side to be ready for responses involving
requests still being transmitted, the patch introduces the concept of the
active request.

When a response matches the current active request, its processing is
delayed until after the tranmission has come to a stop.

This has been tested by Janos and it has been successful in curing this
race condition.

From: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>

  Here is an updated patch which removes the active_req wait in
  nbd_clear_queue and the associated memory barrier.

  I've also clarified this in the comment.

Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Cc: <djani22@dynamicweb.hu>
Cc: Paul Clements <Paul.Clements@SteelEye.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      4b2f0260
    • Joshua Kwan's avatar
      [PATCH] hfsplus oops fix · bd6a59b2
      Joshua Kwan authored 
      

nls_utf8 is available, and the check in hfsplus_fill_super checks the wrong
pointer for NULLness (it checks the saved nls, not the new one that it
needs to use.)

Signed-off-by: default avatarJoshua Kwan <joshk@triplehelix.org>
Cc: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
      bd6a59b2
  3. Jan 06, 2006