Re: [dm-crypt] dm-crypt is broken and causes massive data corruption

From: Christian Schmidt
Date: Thu May 11 2006 - 19:16:49 EST


Paul Slootman wrote:
> Alasdair G Kergon <agk@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 07:20:12PM +0200, Tillmann Steinbrecher wrote:
>>> it's been many months that dm-crypt has been broken, and is known to
>>> cause massive data corruption.
>
>> So far there isn't much in the way of controlled experiments, but:
>>
>> All the reports agree the problem is independent of filesystem.
>>
>> One thread suggests only filesystem metadata is corrupted, not file
>> data, and wonders if something's going wrong with (unsupported) write
>> barriers.
>>
>> Another report said dm-crypt over raid5 failed while raid5
>> over dm-crypt worked.
>
> A data point:
>
> I'm running my /home on reiserfs3 over dm-crypt over lvm over raid5 for
> at least a year now, without any problems. Currently running 2.6.13.4
> (that's my "stable" work system...).

Just so you know,

I'm running dm-crypt on top of raid-5 as well. Kernels ranging from
gentoo's hardened 2.6.11 to 2.6.15.X with gentoo patchset on AMD64. The
raid is running since February 2005 with >1TB and survived a disk
failure with rebuild.
Cipher module was aes, now the asm-accelerated x86_64 version. The
filesystem is ext-3. Survived several hard lockups (damn cheap SATA
controllers hanging if a drive passes out), an LV/filesystem resize, and
feeding with GBytes of data in a row (at max ~30MByte/s to 2-3 files in
parallel).

Just re-checked the filesystem: no metadata information wrong. I
remember I checked the crc of several bigger archives when I had to
replace a drive two month ago, and couldn't find any problems then.

Best regards,
Christian
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/