Hello, I've been looking through the JBD code when trying to understand the assertion failure in log_do_checkpoint() (it was on old SUSE 2.6.5 kernel though the reporter claims to be able to get the failure even with the Stephen's patch fixing a race with journal_put_journal_head()) and I've spotted one place where I think could be a race (the code around there seems to be the same in latest kernels): In log_do_checkpoint() we go through the t_checkpoint_list of a transaction and call __flush_buffer() on each buffer. Suppose there is just one buffer on the list and it is dirty. __flush_buffer() sees it and puts it to an array of buffers for flushing. Then the loop finishes, retry=0, drop_count=0, batch_count=1. So __flush_batch() is called - we drop all locks and sleep. While we are sleeping somebody else comes and makes the buffer dirty again (OK, that is not probable, but I think it could be possible). Now we wake up and call __cleanup_transaction(). It's not able to do anything and returns 0. And we fail on the assertion J_ASSERT(drop_count != 0 || cleanup_ret != 0). Am I missing something? In my opinion we should set retry=1 after we call __flush_batch() even if we call it outside of the "__flush_buffer-loop"...
Honza -- Jan Kara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> SuSE CR Labs - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/