Re: smp dead lock of io_request_lock/queue_lock patch

From: Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
To: Doug Ledford <dledford@redhat.com>,
	Linux Kernel mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: smp dead lock of io_request_lock/queue_lock patch
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 10:40:21 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <400805E5.9070808@tmr.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1elvB-Jt-25@gated-at.bofh.it>

Doug Ledford wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 12:01, Bill Davidsen wrote:

>>"not in a released kernel..." Do I read this right? That you have a fix 
>>for a critical bug and it hasn't been pushed to customers yet?
> 
> 
> No, you don't read this right.  We have a fix for a correctness issue
> that has almost 0% chance of ever triggering in real life, has exactly 0
> bug reports of it ever happening, and which has been integrated into our
> tree.  Obviously, we always push new kernels to all of our customers
> every time we have this situation, or about twice a day...

I actually had in mind a notification so customers would know it was 
there if they actually see a similar problem, and a way to get the fix 
if needed. Since a patch was posted, I assume that's it's not quite as 
unlikely as you seem to imply.

We have two copies of RHEL-3.0 in-house, and I have a budget line item 
to upgrade 38 servers from RH-8.0 this year. Since they are all SMP/SCSI 
I think my concern with this bug, and the bug notification process in 
general is germane. I don't want to apply fixes for problems I don't 
have, but I want to know what fixes are out there so if I have a similar 
problem I can apply the fix(es) which might be related before spending a 
lot of time chasing the problem.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
   CTO TMR Associates, Inc
   Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979