On Mon, 02 Sep 2013 20:45:14 -0700 Chuck Anderson wrote: > The two patches that follow in separate emails resolve soft lockups and > udevd reported errors that prevented a large memory 3.8 system from booting. > > The patches are based on 3.11-rc7. > > I believe it is the same issue recently posted as: > > [RFC] audit: avoid soft lockup in audit_log_start() > https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/8/28/626 Nice to see someone else looking into this! And Thanks for CC'ing me. I've a couple of news to you. First, I've tried to apply your series but got this: [lcapitulino@volcano linux-2.6]$ git am ~/audit-fix.mbox Applying: audit: fix soft lockups due to loop in audit_log_start() wh,en audit_backlog_limit exceeded fatal: corrupt patch at line 23 Patch failed at 0001 audit: fix soft lockups due to loop in audit_log_start() wh,en audit_backlog_limit exceeded The copy of the patch that failed is found in: /home/lcapitulino/work/src/upstream/linux-2.6/.git/rebase-apply/patch When you have resolved this problem, run "git am --resolved". If you prefer to skip this patch, run "git am --skip" instead. To restore the original branch and stop patching, run "git am --abort". [lcapitulino@volcano linux-2.6]$ Now, I was a few minutes a away before sending a different fix I cooked this evening when I got your series in my inbox. So I really wanted to give this a try and applied the first patch manually (resulting version is attached). The softlockup is gone, but I still get a hang for several seconds just like I did with my first rfc. I found a very easy way to reproduce the problem and our analysis is similar, but our solutions differs. I'm going to send my solution right now, sorry for any mistakes it's almost 1h AM here but I really wanted to give your version a try before sending my version (and before going to bed). If you send a v2 I'll try it again and we can discuss our approaches.