Comment 218 for bug 330824

On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 02:57:32AM -0000, Feistybird wrote:
> Hi Ted,
>
> > even though at this point we've got a huge number of Fedora 11 users
> using ext4 w/o any problems.)
>
> Fedora 11 uses linux kernel 2.6.29.4, but Ubuntu 9.04 uses kernel 2.6.28
> by default.
>
> I don't have any ext4 soft-lock-up problems using Ubuntu mainline kernel
> 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 netiher

Yes, and some people have reported that mainline 2.6.28 or 2.6.28.*
also seems to be without problems. I just haven't had the time to try
to go through the Ubuntu Jaunty ext4 patch backports, which is where I
assume the problem might be. However, the problem Roland reported
could very well lead to a deadlock in the truncate path, which is very
much related to the problems are reported. The only way the problem
Roland's potential deadlock could be related to this is if there is a
bug in the Ubuntu ext4 backport such that the truncate code thinks
it's only doing a partial truncate in the case of a delete. But we it
seems pretty clear that there was a bug in the Ubuntu backports of
various ext4 patches, so the one-line patch which I suggested might
actually make things better.

      - Ted