Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 31 Jul 2000 11:19:00 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [patch?] Re: Do ramdisk exec's map direct to buffer cache? |
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On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, Mike Galbraith wrote: > > I keep running into a deadlock with it looping forever trying to > free memory, triggered by blocking in getblk->refill_freelist->.. > try_to_free_buffers->sync_page_buffers->zzzzz (kflushd runs forever). > > The below seems to cure it. Without this, I can lock my box without > much effort. I beat on this pretty hard with no ill effects noted.
This is exactly the kind of patch that the loopback device has always needed, and is exactly the reason why I would prefer to kill loopback as soon as possible.
Either loopback is a block device driver, or it isn't. If it is, then it has absolutely no reason to start messing with fs/buffers.c and add special case logic for itself. And if it isn't, then the whole point of loopback is gone.
I'm inclined to mark loopback DANGEROUS because there apparently still isn't a maintainer for it. And the next person who suggests using it instead of a real filesystem (ramfs, cramfs, JFFS) should be forced to actually make it work right first!
Linus
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