[PATCH 00/30] xfsprogs: Initial CRC support

[Jeff Liu]

On 05/18/2013 02:27 PM, Michael L. Semon wrote:
> On 05/18/2013 01:07 AM, Jeff Liu wrote:
> 
>> Looks our test for 32-bit system is insufficient.  There has another bug
>> reports regarding 32-bit yesterday:
>> http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2013-05/msg00494.html
> 
> I read this and did not chime in because I don't know about the "no 
> space left on device" error.
> 
> The first issue the customer had, though, was one I had on a 2.8GHz 
> Pentium 4.  The idea of using a tunable to increase vmalloc space made 
> me think, "What, am I using FreeBSD or something?  Why didn't Linux 
> auto-tune this?" so I dug deeper.  [Disclaimer:  I use FreeBSD and find 
> value in it, but it requires at least some sysctl tuning for things that 
> Linux will tune automatically.]
> 
> Basically, I had vmalloc space to have an environment set up perfectly 
> in 768 MB of RAM.  Then I added another 512 MB, and Linux saw only 896 
> MB for lack of highmem support.  At that point I enabled highmem 
> support, Linux decided to auto-tune my vmalloc space down to 128 MB, 
> which was not enough to handle an xfsdump of a 30 GB device-mapper crypt 
> partition.  The PC, when left alone, could develop those same oops-y 
> messages while doing incremental xfsdumps overnight, and if left alone 
> for days, even simple cp commands could cause issues.  My resolution was 
> to use the CONFIG_VMSPLIT_2G kernel option and reduce the things 
> reported by /proc/vmallocinfo that are vmalloc items.  Some ioremap 
> items in /proc/vmallocinfo were removed where convenient.  Despite 
> warnings on the Internet like "this breaks ELF" and "this breaks binary 
> modules," I've had no issues with it in the nine months in which the 
> kernel has operated this way.  [Note: I don't use binary modules.  For 
> that matter, only that PC uses modules at all.]  Ultimately, I got rid 
> of the crypts as well, but not before verifying that the above setup did 
> indeed solve the problem at hand.
> 
> It's only my two cents, one person trying to balance Internet research 
> against what actually works in testing on one PC.  If the solution is 
> sane sane to you, feel free to forward this story to your customer to 
> see if anything in it will help.
> 
>> So I'm going to setup a 32-bit test environment for such tests together
>> with Michael.
> 
> Excellent!  Let me know a little about your test environment and whether 
> it's a VM or bare metal.
VM running via virtual box.

The kernel is based on the updated xfs-next tree.

root at linux32bit:/home/jeff# uname -a
Linux linux32bit 3.10.0-rc1+ #1 SMP Sat May 18 15:30:11 CST 2013 i686
i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Thanks,
-Jeff