Bug#613925: linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64: reiserfs: deadlock affecting writes, getdents

[Moritz Muehlenhoff <jmm@inutil.org>]

reassign 613925 src:linux
thanks

> This bug seems to still exist in the current kernel version for Wheezy.
>  But it is very rare;  today it happened after 18 days' uptime, and once
> before after 30+ days uptime.  This is a desktop machine with a single
> SSD SATA drive with usually only light I/O workload.
> 
> Today I noticed all my iceweasel and xfce4-terminal windows had frozen.
> 
> >From a virtual terminal, as root, "ls /tmp" froze (in the getdents
> syscall) but could be killed.  My other reiserfs partitions on the same
> block device worked fine.
> 
> My 'master' xfce4-terminal process was in a blocked state and could not
> be killed.  This, and some unreaped xfce4-terminal child processes that
> I'd tried to kill already, had some open, deleted inodes on /tmp
> 
> I thought I was going to have to reboot, but just out of curiosity I
> killed iceweasel (via the 'non-responding window' feature of xfce4
> window manager).  Immediately my system recovered with /tmp
> readable/writable again.
> 
> I think this suggests it was not a hardware issue, but some deadlock
> between processes doing I/O on reiserfs.
> 
> Last time this happened to me it was the /var partition rather than /tmp
> 
> This problem didn't ever occur in many months of using the Squeeze
> 2.6.32 kernel.
> 
> [I would miss reiserfs very much.  It has provided me with 100%
> durability for many years and performed well.  Even when I once trashed
> the underlying mdraid on another system, reiserfsck rescued my data].

Hi Steven,
hi Bastien,

Jeff Mahoney has posted patches in the upstream bug in May:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29162

Are you in a position to test them and provide him with feedback?

Cheers,
        Moritz