Re: Errr... what's all this about then?

[Bruce Tenison <btenison@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've done a bit more work on this today, and now have a drive that 
doesn't seem to generate the errors I was having.
The solution for me seemed to be enabling devfs support.  I already had 
it compiled into the kernel, but not mounted.
To begin with I noticed that once I used the drive, and rebooted to a 
non-xfs partition (ext2) as root (with an xfs enabled
kernel) and issued an xfs_check on the xfs partition (that was 
previously root) it returned all kinds of errors.

I then, instinctively (I guess), issued an xfs_repair on the drive, and 
wound up with some entries in lost+found, mostly from
either log files or pid files in /var/run (and sometimes the directory 
itself)...  

Well, I noticed that a lot of times I was getting an xfs recovery after 
just issuing a reboot command.  So I started looking at
/etc/rc.d/init.d/halt to see how the filesystems were being umounted.   
It looks at /proc/mounts, so I looked there, and what did
I see?
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun1/part3 / xfs rw 0 0

Hmmm.  Since I have devfs NOT mounted, just compiled in....  Well I 
rebooted, to the non-xfs, mounted the xfs partition, let it
recover, umounted it, then ran xfs_check.   No errors!!!!  Hmm, maybe I 
was overzealous on the xfs_repair earlier.  Shouldn't
xfs_repair check for this case?

Rebooted to the xfs partition with devfs=mount as an option.   
Everything seems to work after that....

Also, I noticed that, near the bottom of /etc/rc.d/init.d/halt there are 
the following lines (note the ext2):
# Remount read only anything that's left mounted.
#echo $"Remounting remaining filesystems (if any) readonly"
mount | awk '/ext2/ { print $3 }' | while read line; do
  mount -n -o ro,remount $line
done

So I guess this is looking for an ext2 partition as the root and maybe 
the only partition left to umount.  Since it's root, I guess
we can only remount it ro.  So I changed it to xfs, and placed a couple 
of mount commands to show me whether or not it worked.
It doesn't seem to remount the root xfs partition read-only (at least 
mount reports (rw) both before and after the remount).

But, at least I'm not seeing the errors anymore (I hope)

Hope this helps.

Bruce

Juha Saarinen wrote:

> :: I've also got a Promise PDC 20262 w/ an IBM Deskstar running in UDMA
> :: mode 4 w/ no problems whatsoever. Additionally a Maxtor Diamond Max
> :: connected to the stock BX MB w/ no problems. Early on (5-6 months ago) I
>
> Yep... you're using a BX440 motherboard. Bruce and I have VIA chip set ones.
> I really, really, really regret buying that Tyan motherboard. :-(
>
> -- Juha