The direct IO path can do a nested transaction reservation when
writing past the EOF. The first transaction is the append
transaction for setting the filesize at IO completion, but we can
also need a transaction for allocation of blocks. If the log is low
on space due to reservations and small log, the append transaction
can be granted after wating for space as the only active transaction
in the system. This then attempts a reservation for an allocation,
which there isn't space in the log for, and the reservation sleeps.
The result is that there is nothing left in the system to wake up
all the processes waiting for log space to come free.
The stack trace that shows this deadlock is relatively innocuous:
This was discovered on a filesystem with a log of only 10MB, and a
log stripe unit of 256k whih increased the base reservations by
512k. Hence a allocation transaction requires 1.2MB of log space to
be available instead of only 260k, and so greatly increased the
chance that there wouldn't be enough log space available for the
nested transaction to succeed. The key to reproducing it is this
mkfs command:
The test case was a 1000 fsstress processes running with random
freeze and unfreezes every few seconds. Thanks to Eryu Guan
(eguan@redhat.com) for writing the test that found this on a system
with a somewhat unique default configuration....
cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Reviewed-by: Andrew Dahl <adahl@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Ben Myers <bpm@sgi.com>