Linux 2.4.25-rc1

Here goes the first release candidate.

It contains mostly networking updates, XFS update, amongst others.

This release contains a fix for excessive inode memory pressure with highmem boxes. Help is specially wanted with testing this on heavy-load highmem machines.

Summary of changes from v2.4.25-pre8 to v2.4.25-rc1
============================================

<chrisw:osdl.org>:
o Verify interpreter arch

<davej:redhat.com>:
o fix agpgart warning

<davem:nuts.davemloft.net>:
o [IRDA]: Mark driver init/exit funcs static where possible
o [SPARC64]: Fix TUNSETIFF ioctl compat, it takes an ifreq ptr not an int
o [TG3]: Bump version and reldate
o [SPARC64}: Fix ultra-III and later support of new-style SILO booting

<grundler:parisc-linux.org>:
o [TG3]: Fix DMA test failures
o [TG3]: Only fetch NVRAM_CMD reg if TG3_FLAG_NVRAM

<jlcooke:certainkey.com>:
o [CRYPTO]: Help gcc optimize sha256/sha512 better

<jmorris:redhat.com>:
o [CRYPTO]: Make padding[] array static in sha{256,512}_final()
o Zero last byte of mount option page

<marcelo:logos.cnet>:
o Changed EXTRAVERSION to -rc1

<rml:ximian.com>:
o Fix sys_readahead(): Count free pages on maximum ra size calculation

Adrian Bunk:
o fix a compile warning in amd76x_pm.c
o fix a compile warning in tipar.c
o fix a compile warning in InterMezzo file.c

Ben Collins:
o [SPARC64]: Add comment for HdrS ver 0x201
o [SPARC64]: Add header for section boundary references
o [SPARC64]: Changes to accomodate booting from non-phys_base memory

Chas Williams:
o [ATM]: [idt77252] fix dma_addr_t type error with CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G=y (by "Randy.Dunlap" <[email protected]>)
o [ATM]: [clip] check return code from kmem_cache_create (by "Randy.Dunlap" <[email protected]>)

Christoph Hellwig:
o [XFS] Small ktrace fixes
o [XFS] Don't fail pagebuf allocations

David Brownell:
o usb/gadget/file_storage.c doesn't compile with gcc 2.95

David S. Miller:
o [DECNET]: Fix filling in of header length field
o [CREDITS]: Update Bjorn Ekwall's address

David Stevens:
o [IPV4]: Add per-device sysctl to force IGMP version
o [IPV4]: Fix IGMP device reference counting

Harald Welte:
o [NETFILTER]: Fix ipt_conntrack/ipt_state module refcounting
o [NETFILTER]: Really fix ipt_state/ipt_conntrack refcounting

Herbert Xu:
o invalid kfree in ntfs_printcb

Luca Tettamanti:
o Fix ac97_plugin_ad1980.c compilation warning
o Fix aha1542.c compilation warning
o Fix cpqfcTSi2c.c compilation warning
o IEEE1394(r1123): Fix compile warning
o Fix amd7930_fn.h compilation warning
o Fix drivers/net/wan/8253x/crc32.c compilation warning
o Fix vac-serial.c compilation warning

Mirko Lindner:
o sk98lin: Reset Xmac when stopping the port

Nathan Scott:
o [XFS] Remove xfsidbg debugger interfaces, not useful without kdb
o [XFS] Fix a warning from some gcc variants after recent flags botch
o [XFS] Add the security extended attributes namespace
o [XFS] Remove no-longer-needed debug symbol exports

Patrick McHardy:
o [NET_SCHED]: Add HFSC packet scheduler

Russell Cattelan:
o [XFS] Christoph has signed over copyrights
o [XFS] Move bits around to better manage common code. No functional change
o [XFS] Remove non 2.4 ifdefs from the linux-2.4 dir

Rusty Russell:
o [NETFILTER]: ipt_limit fix for HZ=1000

Scott Feldman:
o e100 sync with 2.6

This causes the following compile error when trying to compile this driver statically into a kernel with CONFIG_HOTPLUG=n :

<-- snip -->

...
gcc -D__KERNEL__
-I/home/bunk/linux/kernel-2.4/linux-2.4.25-rc1-full-no-hotplug/include
-Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing
-fno-common -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2
-march=athlon -DHISAX_MAX_CARDS=8 -nostdinc -iwithprefix include -DKBUILD_BASENAME=amd7930_fn -c -o amd7930_fn.o amd7930_fn.c
amd7930_fn.c: In function `Amd7930_init':
amd7930_fn.c:752: error: Amd7930_init causes a section type conflict
{standard input}: Assembler messages:
{standard input}:2: Warning: setting incorrect section attributes for .text.init
make[4]: *** [amd7930_fn.o] Error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory `/home/bunk/linux/kernel-2.4/linux-2.4.25-rc1-full-no-hotplug/drivers/isdn/hisax'

<-- snip -->

The fix is obvious:

@@ -61,7 +61,7 @@
 #include <linux/interrupt.h>
 #include <linux/init.h>
 
-static WORD initAMD[] __devinit = {
+static WORD initAMD[] __devinitdata = {
 	0x0100,
 
 	0x00A5, 3, 0x01, 0x40, 0x58,				// LPR, LMR1, LMR2

cu
Adrian

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

How is this likely to manifest itself?

We just had a box which crashed only 2 hour from deployment, and reading over the recent changes this seems like a potential cause (although being new, faulty hardware is always a possibility); the last items on its serial console were:

INIT: Sending processes the TERM signal
memory.c:100: bad pmd 000001e3.
memory.c

Was still responding to ICMP after crash.

Details:

* running 2.4.25 (release with small local patch to put MPT SCSI devices before Adaptec SCSI devices, as "scsihosts" cannot do this)

* IBM x335

* dual Xeon 3.066GHz (hyperthreads in 2.4.25)

* 2.5Gb RAM (HIGHMEM4G)

* high CPU load (two processes around 75% of a CPU each at time of crash, being bzip2 compression of gigabytes of data, and some other processes using somewhat less CPU for network and disk IO)

* moderate IO load (3Mbps on tg3 ethernet, more than double that on each of MPT SCSI and AIC SCSI)

* high inode / file descriptor load -- a single process may open hundreds of thousands of file desciptors over a 5 minute period and then close them all at once; file-max is set to 1024^2

* newly deployed (ie no track record of stability to refer to)

Role of system is basically to receive a constant 3Mbps stream of UDP data which is then written to the internal RAID array, this data is then read from the internal array and written to an external RAID array (in the process doubling in volume; each piece of data ends up in two places; and sometimes being read/written a few times before ending up in the right place) and ultimately compressed and archived.

I've rebooted into 2.4.25 for a second chance but if it fails again, will reboot to 2.4.24 and then if that fails, revert to old hardware and kernel (which was running kernel 2.4.24 on an old Intel ISP2150).

David.

Hi David,

Basically this modification makes the inode reclaiming code rip inodes with highmem-pagecache attached when its necessary.

What happened before was that the low memory could get filled with unreclaimable inodes. Which would screw up the performance badly (and probably crash the system in extreme situations).

This looks like hardware fault to me or a (maybe, not sure) badly behaving driver. The inode-highmem modifications can't cause such breakage, as far as I can see.

Rik, Andrew ?

OK, waiting for you input.

Agreed, this looks like a hardware fault.

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan

I swapped CPU, memory and kernel all at once which resolved the fault, as I had a second failure after this and I had to resolve the fault ASAP so I couldn't trouble-shoot changing things one by one.

I'll re-upgrade to 2.4.25 after the system has been stable for around a week; the original CPU and memory have been placed in a test box and have shown no faults running a memory tester for 24 hours but perhaps it was just a seating issue on a component; I'll report back if there are any problems after re-upgrading.

David.