Re: [PATCH] mm: fix page_mkclean_one (was: 2.6.19 file contentcorruption on ext3)

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Sun Dec 24 2006 - 04:01:09 EST


On Sun, 24 Dec 2006 00:43:54 -0800 (PST)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I now _suspect_ that we're talking about something like
>
> - we started a writeout. The IO is still pending, and the page was
> marked clean and is now in the "writeback" phase.
> - a write happens to the page, and the page gets marked dirty again.
> Marking the page dirty also marks all the _buffers_ in the page dirty,
> but they were actually already dirty, because the IO hasn't completed
> yet.
> - the IO from the _previous_ write completes, and marks the buffers clean
> again.

Some things for the testers to try, please:

- mount the fs with ext2 with the no-buffer-head option. That means either:

grub.conf: rootfstype=ext2 rootflags=nobh
/etc/fstab: ext2 nobh

- mount the fs with ext3 data=writeback, nobh

grub.conf: rootfstype=ext3 rootflags=nobh,data=writeback (I hope this works)
/etc/fstab: ext2 data=writeback,nobh

if that still fails we can rule out buffer_head funnies.

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