Re: Random filesystem corruption

[Juha K Kallio <bunnyh@banix.ihme.org>]

On Sun, Mar 10, 2002 at 01:09:16AM +0100, Sebastian Ude wrote:
> 
> Hi list,
> 
> I have been experiencing corrupted files on multiple XFS filesystems
> recently. The syndroms are that files or directories do appear in their
> parent directory, but are not accessible - you get a "File not found" error
> when trying to open them.
> 
> The corruption is rather random and hard or impossible to reproduce. Today,
> it have been another fourty files and two directories that both contained
> at least ten files. They all resided in the same parent directory, but in
> different subdirectories. Most of the time not whole directories, but just
> one or two files get damaged.
> 
> However, the files were fine yesterday, and I have not done any write
> operations to the appropiate files and documents today.
> 
> Sometimes, but not neccesarily, I get a kernel oops when trying to access
> one of the damaged files, although it does not hang the kernel or parts of
> it.
> 
> I am quite sure that this is not a hardware problem. I have had several
> files getting broken on multiple XFS filesystems that resided on different
> harddisks during the last months.
> 
> 
> Any ideas where the corruption might come from ? If this is really not a
> problem with my system setup (if I remember correctly, someone reported
> similar problems one month or so ago), but a bug in XFS, then it has to be
> fixed ASAP. Random data corruption is a really weird thing.
> 
> In the past, I could fix at least the ghost directory entries using
> xfs_repair, but the corrupted files were lost.
> 
> I wonder if there is any way to restore the affected files or directories ?
> Having noticed the corrupted files, I unmounted the appropiate file system
> read-only immediately.
> 
> 
> My setup:
> 
> - ix86, single processor
> 
> - Affected XFS-Kernels are perhaps, but not neccesarily 2.2.16, 2.2.17,
>   2.2.18 from XFS CVS. The problem may have appeared with older kernels
>   (< 2.2.16), though - I'm afraid I can't remember. But I am sure that XFS
>   has been working fine for at least one year with different older kernel
>   versions on the same machine.
> 
>   No third parity patches applied.
> 
> - All kernels were compiled using egcs 1.1.2 (2.91.66), except the very
>   recent 2.2.18, which was compiled with gcc 3.0.4. Since the problem
>   appeared previously, it can't be the compiler's fault.
> 
> - The XFS file systems reside on different SCSI harddisks attached to an
>   Adaptec 2940UW controller. The disks run other file systems besides XFS
>   (ext2, reiserfs) with no problems at all.
> 
> - No special mount options - just the defaults.
> 
> - No special mkfs.xfs options were used when creating the filesystems -
>   again, simply the defaults.
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Sebastian
>

I had the same problem when restoring my files when switching from ext2
to XFS. I only had one dir broken, not the subdirectories though, files
only. I was using x86 2.4.17-xfs kernel, with the release xfs patch.