>Received: from mobile.sauter-bc.com (unknown [10.1.6.21])
	by basel1.sauter-bc.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B9D0457306
	for <linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com>; Thu, 28 Jun 2001 19:37:12 +0200 (CEST)
Received: from ch.sauter-bc.com (support.cad.sba [10.1.200.117])
	by mobile.sauter-bc.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E128A25835
	for <linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com>; Thu, 28 Jun 2001 19:45:23 +0200 (CEST)
Message-ID: <3B3B6A45.3252B37C@ch.sauter-bc.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 19:32:53 +0200
From: Simon Matter <simon.matter@ch.sauter-bc.com>
Organization: Sauter AG, Basel
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [de] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.19-6.2.7 i686)
X-Accept-Language: de-CH, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: linux-xfs <linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com>
Subject: XFS corruption on SoftRAID5
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Sender: owner-linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com
Precedence: bulk

I don't know what to try anymore...

I'm getting XFS filesystem corruption, I can see this when using ls or
du. Filenames are corrupted and also their content. I was doing the
first test on a DELL Precision Workstation with 4 IDE drives but I have
changed now. So let me explain what exactly I'm doing.

I have set up a DELL PowerEdge 1400 Server, PIII800 / 256MB /
ServerWorks CNB20LE. Two U160-SCSI Disks on the first onboard controller
(AIC-7899). /, /boot and 2x1GB swap are on SoftRAID1 on those two disks.
Until here, no problem at all, using kernel PR1-PR3. Then I installed
one Promise Ultra100TX2 IDE controller, connecting 4 IBM 60GB drives. I
created 1 RAID5 on those 4 drives. I then do a 'sysctl -w
dev.raid.speed_limit_min=10000' to resync the raid faster, otherwise it
takes days to sync. Then while syncing, I create an XFS filsystem on it
and mount it on /home. Now I copy some GB of data from 2 NFS servers
(while it is still syncing). This is going slow because of high priority
syncing, but beside that, not problem at all. Later then, after the sync
has finished and after some reboots, I just made an ls -R /home and
found out that the filnames were corrupt. I know that what I did is a
torture for the system, but it should be able to handle such situations.
Can somebody tell me what could cause the problem. Could it be the
combination of RAID5 / XFS / syncing / heavy load? Unfortunately there
is absolutely noting to find in the kernel logs.

My next steps before giving up:
- I have installed a second Prosime controller to make sure every IDE
disk has it's own channel. (Don't blame Promise, I had exactly the same
prob with the i820 IDE of the DELL Precision 220). Test is running right
now...

- Configuring the 4 IDE disks as RAID10 and test again. I will loose
60GB, but at least we then know that SoftRAID5 with IDE with XFS with
... with ... is DANGEROUS(tm).

- Try with ext2 on the RAID5 :-(

Thanks in advance for any help

Simon