[linux-lvm] lvm deadlock with 2.4.x kernel?

[Joe Thornber]

On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 05:11:47PM -0500, Tom Otake wrote:
> I'm not sure if this has been brought up yet.  Over the weekend, my
> Linux hung up on me twice.  Considering that this never happened before
> and only two things have recently changed (LVM and ReiserFS) , I did
> some reading and came across the bug report for LVM on sistina's website
> about LVM deadlocking Linux.

All the deadlocking issues have been due to either running snapshots
on 2.2 kernels or doing a 'pvmove' on 2.2 or 2.4.  It doesn't sound
like you were doing either.

> 
> I'm running kernle 2.4.3 with LVM compiled into the kernel.  LVM is
> 0.9.1_beta7, reiser is 3.x.0j.  All essential fs (/, /usr, /var, /tmp)
> are still using ext2 and linux partitions, non essential fs (/home
> amongst others) are all on  reiserfs with LVM, excluding /usr/local,
> which is still on ext2 and Linux partition.
> 
> The first occurance:
> Running vmware (not on lvm/reiser) while browsing the web using netscape
> and running seti at home.  The system hung on me when I tried to access a
> web page that appeared to be task intensive, wether servlets,
> javascript, flash, or something else, I don't know.

I used to get deadlocks from vmware without using LVM.

> The second occurance:
> I was copying a large amount of data from a CDROM to my home dir (on
> lvm).  While the copy was in progress, I created a new LV.  This
> worked.  The system hung when I ran mkreiserfs on the new LV.

This sounds more serious.  Can you reproduce it ?  If you can the
quickest way for us to find the problem is for you to build the kernel
with kdb and get stack traces for the relevent threads.

> As I said, I'm not sure if the system hang was caused by the deadlock,
> since the system was dead.  If this is related to the deadlock issue,
> are there any possible workarounds, besides being mindful of the system
> load?

I am not aware of any deadlock issues in beta7.  Has anyone else
experienced problems ?

- Joe