Re: Possible e2fs bug.
Bruce Murphy (packrat@iinet.net.au)
Tue, 02 Jul 1996 12:39:50 +0800
"Theodore Y. Ts'o" wrote:
> Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1996 20:57:06 +0800
> From: Bruce Murphy <packrat@iinet.net.au>
>
> The process was stuck in a loop somewhere in Kernel-land I assume, as
> I couldn't terminate it. Ended up changing into single user mode to
> unmount and fsck the filesystem. Still had this damn rm running chewing
> up all idle CPU time.
>
> If you were able to unmount the filesystem while the rm was still
> running, then things were pretty confused indeed. The real question is
> wheather this was caused by (a) filesystem corruption, (b) a real kernel
> bug / race condition in the filesystem code, (c) a kernel bug somewhere
> else that trashed memory which the filesystem code depends on, or (d) a
> memory corruption bug.
>
> Unfortunately, it sounds like you weren't able to collect enough
> information to figure out which one of these cases is correct.
Filesystem was clean. (fsckly at least) and I couldn't actually
unmount it, I was forced to remount it read only. I wasn't expecting
that to work, but there you go.
I don't think there was any actual damage to the kernel filesystem
code itself, because no other operations were behaving strangely (a
parallel rm -r that finished successfully later and some other cleanup
operations)
Leaves it with real options being b and d. Didn't see any way I could
check (d) except to say that I haven't *seen* any of the other
symptoms of hardware memory problems, I'm not looking too hard, I'm
going to replace this box soon enough.
Just thought I might add my voice to anyone else's who was having
problems. Might prompt the maintainer of the e2fs stuff to have
another look at it sometime.
B
--
Packrat (BSc/BE;COSO;Wombat Implementor)
Nihil illegitemi carborvndvm.