[ 3.5.y.z extended stable ] Patch "ext4: don't allow ext4_free_blocks() to fail due to ENOMEM" has been added to staging queue

[Luis Henriques]

This is a note to let you know that I have just added a patch titled

    ext4: don't allow ext4_free_blocks() to fail due to ENOMEM

to the linux-3.5.y-queue branch of the 3.5.y.z extended stable tree 
which can be found at:

 http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/linux.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/linux-3.5.y-queue

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to this tree, please 
reply to this email.

For more information about the 3.5.y.z tree, see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/ExtendedStable

Thanks.
-Luis

------

>From 4f6d36e51b88405816dd6f1ebbe8eaad848d0288 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 00:40:35 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] ext4: don't allow ext4_free_blocks() to fail due to ENOMEM

commit e7676a704ee0a1ef71a6b23760b5a8f6896cb1a1 upstream.

The filesystem should not be marked inconsistent if ext4_free_blocks()
is not able to allocate memory.  Unfortunately some callers (most
notably ext4_truncate) don't have a way to reflect an error back up to
the VFS.  And even if we did, most userspace applications won't deal
with most system calls returning ENOMEM anyway.

Reported-by: Nagachandra P <nagachandra at gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso at mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Luis Henriques <luis.henriques at canonical.com>
---
 fs/ext4/mballoc.c | 11 ++++++++---
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/fs/ext4/mballoc.c b/fs/ext4/mballoc.c
index 4986dd3..aaece99 100644
--- a/fs/ext4/mballoc.c
+++ b/fs/ext4/mballoc.c
@@ -4636,11 +4636,16 @@ do_more:
 		 * blocks being freed are metadata. these blocks shouldn't
 		 * be used until this transaction is committed
 		 */
+	retry:
 		new_entry = kmem_cache_alloc(ext4_free_data_cachep, GFP_NOFS);
 		if (!new_entry) {
-			ext4_mb_unload_buddy(&e4b);
-			err = -ENOMEM;
-			goto error_return;
+			/*
+			 * We use a retry loop because
+			 * ext4_free_blocks() is not allowed to fail.
+			 */
+			cond_resched();
+			congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/50);
+			goto retry;
 		}
 		new_entry->efd_start_cluster = bit;
 		new_entry->efd_group = block_group;
--
1.8.1.2