Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 09:44:25 +1100
From: Nathan Scott <nathans@sgi.com>
To: Melissa Terwilliger <techess@umich.edu>
Cc: linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com
Subject: Re: Xfs partition info seems to be lost on reboot
Message-ID: <20041109224425.GB740@frodo>
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On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 05:36:47PM -0500, Melissa Terwilliger wrote:
> 
> I have a dual opteron SuSE 9 SLES machine running 2.6.9 kernel.  The

I guess that means you built your own kernel (since SLES9 is a
2.6.5 based kernel).  Did you enable CONFIG_LBD?

> I can create the partitions using parted & when I mount the two
> partitions  they show up correctly as 2.6 TB each and they seem to be
> working perfectly.  When I reboot the system I get the error:
> kernel:XFS:size check 2 failed in the kernel log and the mount command
> came back bad superblock on /dev/sdb1.  I can no longer mount the

XFS does a check on mount to make sure that the last sector on the
device is actually accessible (ie. does a read of the last 512 bytes).
For your kernel, this read is giving an error, so XFS doesn't trust
the device and fails the mount.

> drives.  I tried doing a xfs_repair to fix the drive and I can mount
> it again, but it only shows up as 513GB after that.  Then I have to go

Not sure I can explain that bit.  I wouldn't have expected repair
to do that even if the device driver is doing funky things.

> into parted again to delete the partition and recreate it.  Again it
> works until I reboot whether or not I have it set to mount in the fstab
> or to mount by hand later.
> 
> When I format the drive as ext3 I don't have this problem and it is 100%
> stable.  It only looses the information when I use xfs.  I'm sure I'm just
> missing something but I'm not certain what.

Hmm.  ext3 wont be doing the final sector read check I expect... so,
it works fine (and the odds of allocating something at the high end
of the device is unlikely, during a simple test like this).

> Basically this is what I am doing to create the partitions:
> 
> #parted /dev/sdb
> #mkpart primary xfs 0.0 2622488.000

I don't know much about parted, but there was a report on the lbd
list the other day - maybe check the archive for that list, I can't
remember what the solution was there off the top of my head.

> I can mount and unmount this device repeatedly with no problems until
> I reboot.

Very odd.  I suspect its more likely to be a driver/partition table
problem rather than an XFS problem though.

cheers.

-- 
Nathan