From: Mikulas Patocka 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: Mikulas Patocka Cc: stable@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon --- drivers/md/dm-bufio.c | 24 +++++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) Index: linux/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c =================================================================== --- linux.orig/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c +++ linux/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c @@ -319,6 +319,9 @@ static void __cache_size_refresh(void) static void *alloc_buffer_data(struct dm_bufio_client *c, gfp_t gfp_mask, enum data_mode *data_mode) { + unsigned noio_flag; + void *ptr; + if (c->block_size <= DM_BUFIO_BLOCK_SIZE_SLAB_LIMIT) { *data_mode = DATA_MODE_SLAB; return kmem_cache_alloc(DM_BUFIO_CACHE(c), gfp_mask); @@ -332,7 +335,26 @@ static void *alloc_buffer_data(struct dm } *data_mode = DATA_MODE_VMALLOC; - return __vmalloc(c->block_size, gfp_mask, PAGE_KERNEL); + + /* + * __vmalloc allocates the data pages and auxiliary structures with + * gfp_flags that were specified, but pagetables are always allocated + * with GFP_KERNEL, no matter what was specified as gfp_mask. + * + * Consequently, we must set per-process flag PF_MEMALLOC_NOIO so that + * all allocations done by this process (including pagetables) are done + * as if GFP_NOIO was specified. + */ + + if (gfp_mask & __GFP_NORETRY) + noio_flag = memalloc_noio_save(); + + ptr = __vmalloc(c->block_size, gfp_mask, PAGE_KERNEL); + + if (gfp_mask & __GFP_NORETRY) + memalloc_noio_restore(noio_flag); + + return ptr; } /*