Re: 2.6.19 file content corruption on ext3



On Thu, 28 Dec 2006, Marc Haber wrote:

After being up for ten days, I have now encountered the file
corruption of pkgcache.bin for the first time again. The 256 MB i386
box is like 26M in swap, is under very moderate load.

I am running plain vanilla 2.6.19.1. Is there a patch that I should
apply against 2.6.19.1 that would help in debugging?

Not right now.

And I have a test-program that shows the corruption _much_ easier (at
least according to my own testing, and that of several reporters that back
me up), and that seems to show the corruption going way way back (ie going
back to Linux-2.6.5 at least, according to one tester).

So it just got a lot _easier_ to trigger in 2.6.19, but it's not a new
bug.

What we need now is actually looking at the source code, and people who
understand the VM, I'm afraid. I'm gathering traces now that I have a good
test-case. I'll post my trace tools once I've tested that they work, in
case others want to help.

(And hey, you don't have to be a VM expert to help: this could be a
learning experience. However, I'll warn you: this is _the_ most grotty
part of the whole kernel. It's not even ugly, it's just damn hard and
complex).

Linus
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