Hello all, I know this is quite an old thread.  I recently acquired some 
alpha hardware and have run into this exact same problem on the latest 
stable kernel (5.18 and 5.19).  CONFIG_COMPACTION seems to be totally 
broken and causes userspace to be extremely unstable - random segfaults, 
corruption of glibc data structures, gcc ICEs etc etc - seems most 
noticable during tasks with heavy I/O load.

My hardware is a DS15 (Titan), so only slightly newer than the Tsunamis 
mentioned earlier.  The problem is greatly exacerbated when using a 
machine-optimized kernel (CONFIG_ALPHA_TITAN) over one with 
CONFIG_ALPHA_GENERIC.  But it still doesn't go away on a generic kernel, 
just pops up less often, usually very I/O heavy tasks like checking out 
a tag in the kernel repo.

However all of this seems to be dependent on CONFIG_COMPACTION.  With 
this toggled off all problems disappear, regardless of other options.  I 
tried reverting the commit 88dbcbb3a4847f5e6dfeae952d3105497700c128 
mentioned earlier in the thread (the structure has moved to a different 
file but was otherwise the same), but it unfortunately did not make a 
difference.

Since this doesn't seem to have a known cause or an easy fix, would it 
be reasonable to just add a Kconfig dep to disable it automatically on 
alpha?

Thank you!

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: ext4 corruption on alpha with 4.20.0-09062-gd8372ba8ce28
Date: 2019-02-21 08:29
 From: Jan Kara [off-list ref]
To: Meelis Roos <redacted>

On Thu 21-02-19 01:23:50, Meelis Roos wrote:

quoted

quoted

First, I found out that both the problematic alphas had memory compaction and
page migration and bounce buffers turned on, and working alphas had them off.

Next, turing off these options makes the problematic alphas work.

OK, thanks for testing! Can you narrow down whether the problem is due to
CONFIG_BOUNCE or CONFIG_MIGRATION + CONFIG_COMPACTION? These are two
completely different things so knowing where to look will help. Thanks!

Tested both.

Just CONFIG_MIGRATION + CONFIG_COMPACTION breaks the alpha.
Just CONFIG_BOUNCE has no effect in 5 tries.

OK, so page migration is problematic. Thanks for confirmation!

								Honza