Re: XFS bug? (was: Red Hat Linux 9 XFS DVD Released)

[Stefan Smietanowski <stesmi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve Lord wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 11:38, Axel Thimm wrote:
>
> > So what is the fault there? Why does one need to unmount and remount, and more
> > important, when does one have to do so?
> >
> > There have been reports with people upgrading their rpm (xfs enabled) kernels
> > and crashing the GRUB second load stage. At the first sight this looks like
> > the same bug the installer sees (these people have obviously installed the new
> > kernel and rebooted a short while after, like the installer does).
> >
> > Maybe xfs root (or boot) filesystems don't write dirty buffers back, and
> > (as a workaround) should always be remounted before shutting them down?
>
> If you have ext3 filesystems active on the same box then a bug in
> ext3 can actually prevent kernel threads from flushing anything else
> to disk. This is fixed in the latest 2.4.21-pre kernel, but not a
> lot of other places. If folks are running with ext3 in the mix this
> may be the cause of the problem.
>
> Steve
This bug appears also on pure XFS systems. I even hacked XFS to always 
mount the filesystem sync and it still didn't help.
// Stefan