Re: xfsdump stuck in io_schedule

[Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxxx>]

> I agree. What points me to this list is that I observed such behavior
> only with xfsdump. Although 2.5 is still in development phase, VM has
> been really stable recently. But yes, it's possible that this is a
> genuine kernel VM bug, and xfsdump just triggers it.

I guess xfsdump pins both a lot of pages and a lot of inodes/dentries
(similar to a program that opens a few thousand files and mlocks 
significant parts of its address space). May not be the best tested
scenario in the world. It apparently is called the "google workload"
(because all the hundreds of google cluster boxes run in a similar
setup) and it was only fixed in 2.4 VM a short time ago.

-Andi