Re: [GIT PULL] xfs: fixes for 5.3-rc5

[Darrick J. Wong]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 12:38:33PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Pulled. Just a quick note:
> 
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 10:13 AM Darrick J. Wong <djwong@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > - Convert more directory corruption debugging asserts to actual
> >   EFSCORRUPTED returns instead of blowing up later on.
> 
> The proper error code looks like an obvious improvement, but I do
> wonder if there should be some (ratelimited) system logging too?
> 
> I've seen a lot of programs that don't report errors very clearly and
> might just silently stop running and as a sysadmin I'd think I'd
> rather have something in the system logs than users saying "my app
> crashes at startup"/
> 
> Maybe the logging ends up being there already - just done later. It
> wasn't obvious from the patch, and I didn't check the whole callchain
> (only direct callers).

Metadata update failures hitting EFSCORRUPTED will leave a fair amount
of spew in dmesg both when we find the corrupt metadata and the update
transaction is aborted (which takes the filesystem down).  Read errors
get logged if we spot an error within a block but aren't consistently
logged when we discover problems between separate metadata objects.

FWIW I've wondered off and on if the VFS syscalls should be generating
some kind of audit trail when something returns an error message to
userspace?

--D

>                   Linus