quota deadlock on 6.1-RC1

[Chris Dillon]

Quoting Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org>:

> On February 21 -- that is over 2 months ago -- I sent email to this
> list containing a fix for the quota deadlocks that were known at the
> time.  I got minimal response from users, but it was uniformly
> positive.  The fix was committed, and the status of the "quota
> deadlocks" item on the 6.1-RELEASE todo list was changed from "must
> fix" to "believed fixed, please test".
>
> The next I heard about the problem was about a week ago when someone
> reported another deadlock and several others chimed in with "oh yeah,
> it still deadlocks for me too".
>
> Well, sorry folks, you should have told me in February.  Or if you
> only found out about the problem a week ago, you need to recognize
> that problems raised at the last minute cannot always be fixed
> instantly.

I was one of those others who said "me too". :-)

Although I subscribe to every FreeBSD mailing list, I usually just  
glance over all of the subject lines until something catches my eye.   
So, unfortunately, I apparently missed that whole bit and it wasn't  
until a particular subject caught my eye recently that I thought it  
might be addressing the same problem I had.  I hadn't mentioned the  
problem to the lists before because I had zero diagnostic information  
about it and it was a production box that I couldn't fool around with  
too much, so I had found a workaround (daily reboot) a long time ago  
and didn't think much more about it.  Although I recently compiled the  
kernel with various debug options (WITNESS, DDB, etc.), it takes days  
for it to recur (without daily reboots) and when it hanged again a  
couple of nights ago, I completely forgot about trying to break into  
the debugger and rebooted the box anyway.  *slaps forehead*  And of  
course it hasn't happened again, yet.  Maybe next time.

I'll be happy when we figure out what the problem is and find a fix  
for it, it doesn't matter to me whether or not it makes it into the  
6.1 release.