Re: [PATCH 1/2] fs: ext4: use BUG_ON if writepage call comes from direct reclaim
From: Theodore Y. Ts'o
Date: Tue Jul 03 2018 - 19:52:25 EST
On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 10:05:04AM -0700, Yang Shi wrote:
> I'm not sure if it is a good choice to let filesystem handle such vital VM
> regression. IMHO, writing out filesystem page from direct reclaim context is
> a vital VM bug. It means something is definitely wrong in VM. It should
> never happen.
If it does happen, it should happen reliably; this isn't the sort of
thing where some linked list had gotten corrupted. This would be a
structural problem in the VM code.
So presumably, if the WARN_ON triggered, it should be be noticed by VM
developers, and they should fix it.
In general, though, BUG_ON's should be avoided unless there really is
no way to recover.
> It sounds ok to have filesystem throw out warning and handle it, but I'm not
> sure if someone will just ignore the warning, but it should *never* be
> ignored.
If a kernel develper (a VM developer in this case) ignores a warning,
that's just simply professional malpractice. In general WARN_ON's
should only be used as a sign of a kernel bug. So they should never
be ignored.
- Ted