PROBLEM + POSS FIX: kernel stack overflow, xfs, many disks, heavy write load, 8k stack, x86-64

[John Berthels]

Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 09:43:41AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
>   
> And there's a patch attached that stops direct reclaim from writing
> back dirty pages - it seems to work fine from some rough testing
> I've done. Perhaps you might want to give it a spin on a
> test box, John?
>   
Thanks very much for this. The patch is in and soaking on a THREAD_ORDER 
1 kernel (2.6.33.2 + patch + stack instrumentation), so far so good, but 
it's early days. After about 2hrs of uptime:

$ dmesg | grep stack | tail -1
[   60.350766] apache2 used greatest stack depth: 2544 bytes left

(which tallies well with your 5 1/2Kbytes usage figure).

I'll reply again after it's been running long enough to draw conclusions.

jb