BTRFS/EXT4 Data Corruption

From: Sebastian Hyrwall
Date: Sun Jun 28 2020 - 15:02:27 EST


Hi

Sorry if this is not the right place for this email but I can't think of another place (might be linux-fsdevel)
Someone here is ought to be an expert in this.

It all started as having file corruptions inside VMs that then led to alot of testing that
resulted in replicatable results on the backend NAS.

Tests where done by generating 100 1GB files from /dev/urandom to "volume1" (both BTRFS and EXT4 tested).
MD5 hashing the files and then copying the files to "volume2". 2-4% of the files would fail the hash match every time
the test was done.

After alot of fiddling around it turned out that the problem goes away if doing "cp --sparse=never"
when copying the files. This would to me exclude any hardware errors and feels more like something
deeper inside the kernel.

The box runs Kernel 3.10.105. Version >4 seems unaffected (not 100% confirmed, too few testboxes).

Here is a diff between a hexdump of a failed file,

43861581c43861581
< 29d464c0: aca0 d68f 0ff4 0bad fa4M-5 1339 8148 30e8 .........E.9.H0.
---
> 29d464c0: aca0 d68f 0ff4 0bad fa45 1339 8148 30e8 .........E.9.H0.
55989446c55989446
< 35654c50: 31f4 f7b5 40be 2188 c539 043b 35b4 abb5 1...@.!..9.;5...
---
> 35654c50: 3174 f7b5 40be 2188 c539 043b 35b4 abb5 1t..@.!..9.;5...

As you can see it's a single flipped bit (31f4, 3174). I'm not sure about "fa4M-5". Never seen "M-" before.


Details,

Linux 3.10.105,
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz,
Volume ontop of lvm and md-raid,
md2 : active raid5 sda3[0] sdj3[5] sdi3[4] sdf3[3] sde3[2] sdb3[1]
ÂÂÂÂÂ 39046022720 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU],
cp (GNU coreutils) 8.24

BTRFS and EXT4 default mount options.



// Sebastian H