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  • Mikulas Patocka's avatar
    dm bufio: avoid a possible __vmalloc deadlock · 502624bd
    Mikulas Patocka authored
    
    
    This patch uses memalloc_noio_save to avoid a possible deadlock in
    dm-bufio.  (it could happen only with large block size, at most
    PAGE_SIZE << MAX_ORDER (typically 8MiB).
    
    __vmalloc doesn't fully respect gfp flags. The specified gfp flags are
    used for allocation of requested pages, structures vmap_area, vmap_block
    and vm_struct and the radix tree nodes.
    
    However, the kernel pagetables are allocated always with GFP_KERNEL.
    Thus the allocation of pagetables can recurse back to the I/O layer and
    cause a deadlock.
    
    This patch uses the function memalloc_noio_save to set per-process
    PF_MEMALLOC_NOIO flag and the function memalloc_noio_restore to restore
    it. When this flag is set, all allocations in the process are done with
    implied GFP_NOIO flag, thus the deadlock can't happen.
    
    This should be backported to stable kernels, but they don't have the
    PF_MEMALLOC_NOIO flag and memalloc_noio_save/memalloc_noio_restore
    functions. So, PF_MEMALLOC should be set and restored instead.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
    Cc: stable@kernel.org
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAlasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
    502624bd