[BUG][bisected 270065e] linux-next fails to boot on powerpc

[Bart Van Assche]

On Fri, 2017-08-18 at 16:57 -0500, Brian King wrote:
> To add to my analysis above, #9 should not be there... It looks like
> jiffies_at_alloc would also be getting reinitialized in this case, resulting in
> a perpetual retry, which is what I was seeing.

Hello Brian,

Some time ago I noticed that jiffies_at_alloc is indeed set while a command
is being prepared instead of at command allocation time. I think that
behavior was introduced in 2005 through commit b21a41385118 ("[SCSI] add
global timeout to the scsi mid-layer"). At that time SCSI commands were
allocated at prep time and freed at unprep time. Recently that has been
changed such that a SCSI command (struct scsi_cmnd) has the same lifetime as
struct request. In other words, it was not possible in 2005 but it is
possible today to set jiffies_at_alloc at command allocation time instead of
when a command is being prepared. Do you want me to submit a patch that
implements this change?

Bart.