xfsdump showing system problems -- ? ideas?

[Dave Chinner]

On Sat, Feb 02, 2013 at 07:49:53PM -0800, Linda Walsh wrote:
> 
> 
> I was looking through my backup logs and noticed a few of the
> *logs* of the backups having abnormally high size.
> 
> In looking at them, I saw a bunch of messages (last night 3211 occurrences),
> of messages like:
> 
> xfsdump: WARNING: could not get list of root attributes for nondir
> ino 3415547687: Cannot allocate memory (12)
> xfsdump: WARNING: could not get list of secure attributes for nondir
> ino 3415547687: Cannot allocate memory (12)
> xfsdump: WARNING: could not get list of non-root attributes for
> nondir ino 3415547688: Cannot allocate memory (12)
> xfsdump: WARNIN: could not get list of non-root attributes for
> nondir ino 4225270812: Cannot allocate memory (12)
> xfsdump: WARNING: could not get list of root attributes for nondir
> ino 4225270812: Cannot allocate memory (12)
> xfsdump: WARNING: could not get list of secure attributes for nondir
> ino 4225270812: Cannot allocate memory (12)

Was fixed in 3.4:

$ gl -n 1 ad650f5
commit ad650f5b27bc9858360b42aaa0d9204d16115316
Author: Dave Chinner <dchinner at redhat.com>
Date:   Wed Mar 7 04:50:21 2012 +0000

    xfs: fallback to vmalloc for large buffers in xfs_attrmulti_attr_get
    
    xfsdump uses for a large buffer for extended attributes, which has a
    kmalloc'd shadow buffer in the kernel. This can fail after the
    system has been running for some time as it is a high order
    allocation. Add a fallback to vmalloc so that it doesn't require
    contiguous memory and so won't randomly fail while xfsdump is
    running.
    
    Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner at redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst.de>
    Reviewed-by: Mark Tinguely <tinguely at sgi.com>
    Signed-off-by: Ben Myers <bpm at sgi.com>
$ git describe --contains ad650f5
v3.4-rc1~55^2~11
$

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david at fromorbit.com