[Devel] [PATCH] remove BUG() in possible but rare condition

Glauber Costa glommer at parallels.com
Wed Apr 11 11:10:24 PDT 2012


While stressing the kernel with with failing allocations today,
I hit the following chain of events:

alloc_page_buffers():

	bh = alloc_buffer_head(GFP_NOFS);
	if (!bh)
		goto no_grow; <= path taken

grow_dev_page():
        bh = alloc_page_buffers(page, size, 0);
        if (!bh)
                goto failed;  <= taken, consequence of the above

and then the failed path BUG()s the kernel.

The failure is inserted a litte bit artificially, but even then,
I see no reason why it should be deemed impossible in a real box.

Even though this is not a condition that we expect to see
around every time, failed allocations are expected to be handled,
and BUG() sounds just too much. As a matter of fact, grow_dev_page()
can return NULL just fine in other circumstances, so I propose we just
remove it, then.

Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <glommer at parallels.com>
CC: Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org>
CC: Andrew Morton <akpm at linux-foundation.org>
---
 fs/buffer.c |    1 -
 1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/fs/buffer.c b/fs/buffer.c
index 36d6665..351e18e 100644
--- a/fs/buffer.c
+++ b/fs/buffer.c
@@ -985,7 +985,6 @@ grow_dev_page(struct block_device *bdev, sector_t block,
 	return page;
 
 failed:
-	BUG();
 	unlock_page(page);
 	page_cache_release(page);
 	return NULL;
-- 
1.7.7.6




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