On 2016-09-12 08:33, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
On 9/9/16 8:47 PM, Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote:
A couple of other things to comment about on this:
1. 'can_overcommit' (the function that the Arch kernel choked on) is
from the memory management subsystem.  The fact that that's throwing a
null pointer says to me either your hardware has issues, or the Arch
kernel itself has problems (which would probably mean the kernel image
is corrupted).

fs/btrfs/extent-tree.c:
static int can_overcommit(struct btrfs_root *root,
                          struct btrfs_space_info *space_info, u64 bytes,
                          enum btrfs_reserve_flush_enum flush)

OK, my bad there, but that begs the question: why does a BTRFS function not have a BTRFS prefix? The name blatantly sounds like a mm function (and I could have sworn I can across one with an almost identical name when I was trying to understand the mm code a couple months ago), and the lack of a prefix combined with that heavily implies that it's a core kernel function.

Given this, it's almost certainly the balance choking on corrupted metadata that's causing the issue.
3. In general, it's a good idea to keep an eye on space usage on your
filesystems.  If it's getting to be more than about 95% full, you should
be looking at getting some more storage space.  This is especially true
for BTRFS, as a 100% full BTRFS filesystem functionally becomes
permanently read-only because there's nowhere for the copy-on-write
updates to write to.

The entire point of having the global metadata reserve is to avoid that
situation.
Except that the global metadata reserve is usually only just barely big enough, and it only works for metadata. While I get that this issue is what it's supposed to fix, it doesn't do so in a way that makes it easy to get out of that situation. The reserve itself is often not big enough to do anything in any reasonable amount of time once the FS gets beyond about a hundred GB and yous tart talking about very large files.
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