BUG() in end_page_writeback(), stack overflows and system speed decrease with XFS over USB

[Eric Sandeen]

Eric Sandeen wrote:
> Juergen Urban wrote:
>> On Thursday 19 November 2009 19:00:16 Eric Sandeen wrote:
>>> Juergen Urban wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> my machine is running very unstable since I use XFS on an external USB
>>>> harddisc (855 GByte XFS partition on 1TByte). One problem was the stack
>>>> overflows caused by the large stack use of XFS, USB, SCSI and VFS in
>>>> Linux 2.6.23.13. NFS on XFS caused much more stack overflows. I think I
>>>> got around the stack overflows by disabling preemption, SMP and NFS in
>>>> Linux, but I am not sure about it. I think that I didn't got a message
>>>> from the stack overflow detection after this.
>>> Are you on 4k stacks?  To be honest I'd still expect things to be mostly
>>> ok stack-wise even if so.
>> No, I am using 8k stacks.
> 
> Hmm.
> 

BTW if you are still seeing stack overflows when testing w/ the newer
kernel, we can use some tracing to see what the stack backtrace is:

sysctl -w kernel.stack_tracer_enabled=1
mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug/

and then look in:

/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/stack_trace
/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/stack_max_size

-Eric