Re: Laptop mode causing writes to wrong sectors?

[Bill Davidsen]

Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
>
>
> > let me start by stating that the following is mainly guessed. I may be
> > completely wrong. Still I think you may be interested in my
> > observations, and perhaps you already got similar reports?
> >
> > On my laptop, running 2.6.14, I'm observing some strange file- and
> > filesystem corruptions. First, I thought it may have been caused by an
> > ext3 bug because the first corruption I did observe happened shortly
> > after an ext3 journal replay.
> >
> > I did report this to linux-kernel, but without any helpful response:
> > http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0511.0/0129.html
> > (Subject: ext3 corruption: "JBD: no valid journal superblock found")
> >
> > But now, I got another hint pointing to a possible cause of this
> > problem: I found a file - /usr/lib/libatlas.so.3.0 - which was corrupted
> > by 4k of it being overwritten by a different file, which I recognized. 
> > And that file happened to be an uncompressed manual page.
> >
> > As usually the manual pages are only stored compressed, this must have
> > happened when I actually did look at that manual page, which causes the
> > uncompressed version to be written to a file in /tmp/. And the best is:
> > I actually remember when I did read that man page, and it was while the
> > notebook ran on battery power, which is quite seldom. On battery power,
> > I have laptop mode activated and the hard disk spun down after a short
> > idle time.
> >
> > Why do I think this is related to the corruption? Well, on the one hand,
> > I'm compiling kernels quite often, tracking linus' git repository,
> > and
>
>
> Can you try some filesystem test while forcing disk spindowns via
> hdparm?
>
> It may be bug in laptop mode, or a bug in ide (or something
> related)... trying spindowns without laptopmode would be helpful.
I don't know if it would be helpful, but I run several servers with 
multiple drives, usually 4-5, some of which are in RAID and some aren't, 
and they all spin down and restart without problems many times a day. 
The kernel is 2.6.14.? with one patch to get my unsupported VIA IDE working.

My laptop also has a spindown (five min from memory) and I have yet to 
have a problem with it. Don't know if any of that is "spindowns without 
laptopmode" in a useful sense.

--
   -bill davidsen (davidsen@xxxxxxx)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
 last possible moment - but no longer"  -me
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