Re: New thread RDSL, post-2.6.20 kernels and amanda (tar) miss-fires

[Ray Lee]

On 3/13/07, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 March 2007, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >On Tuesday 13 March 2007, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >>Greetings;
> >>Someone suggested a fresh thread for this.
> >>
> >>I now have my scripts more or less under control, and I can report that
> >>kernel-2.6.20.1 with no other patches does not exhibit the undesirable
> >>behaviour where tar thinks its all new, even when told to do a level 2
> >> on a directory tree that hasn't been touched in months to update
> >> anything.
> >>
> >>Next up, 2.6.20.2, plain and with the latest RDSL-0.30 patch.
> >
> >And amanda/tar worked normally for 2.6.20.2 plain.
> >
> >Next up, 2.6.21-rc1 if it will build here.
>
> It built, it booted, and its busted big time.  First, with an amdump
> running in the background, the machine is so close to unusable that I
> considered rebooting, but I needed the data to show the problem.  I am
> losing the keyboard and mouse for a minute or more at a time but the
> keystrokes seem to be being registered so it eventually catches up.
>
> Disk i/o seems to be the killer according to gkrellm.
>
> But to give one an idea of the fits this is giving tar, I'll snip a line
> or 2 from an amstatus report here:
> coyote:/GenesAmandaHelper-0.6 1 planner: [dumps way too big, 138200 KB,
> must skip incremental dumps]
>
> Huh?  138.2GB?  A 'du -h .' in that dir says 766megs.
>
> coyote:/root                  1     4426m wait for dumping
> du -h says 5.0GB so that's ballpark, but its also a level 1, so maybe 20
> megs is actually new since 15:57 this afternoon local.  kmails final
> maildir is in that dir.
>
> This goes on for much of the amstatus report, very few of the reported
> sizes are close to sane.
>
> Now, can someone suggest a patch I can revert that might fix this?  The
> total number of patches between 2.6.20 and 2.6.21-rc1 will have me
> building kernels to bisect this till the middle of June at this rate.

In a previous email, you said you were using ext3. If that's the case,
there doesn't appear to be much going on in terms of patches between
2.6.20 and 2.6.21-rc1. The only one that even comes close to looking
like it might have an effect would only come in to play if you have a
filesystem that has ACL information, but is mounted by a kernel that
doesn't have ACL support.

I have to echo wli here, I'm afraid, and recommend at least a *few*
bisections to help narrow down the list of suspect patches.

There are tutorials out there for git users. I use the mercurial
repository, as I find the mercurial interface and workflow a lot more
intuitive, but it has the same capability.

Even 2-5 bisections will greatly help others hunt the bug down.

Ray
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