Re: Random filesystem corruption

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen@sgi.com>]

Hi Sebastian -

On Sun, 10 Mar 2002, Sebastian Ude wrote:

> 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.

Can you do an "strace" on a simple program that tries to open one of these
files, and send the last bit (the failed open)? Also - are you
experiencing this problem on several different machines?  I assume this is
local, not NFS access?

> 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.

When you have a file with this problem, though, I assume the behavior is
repeatable on that file?

Out of curiosity, do either the files or the directories have
"international" characters in the names?

> 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.

Decoding the oops through ksymoops would be helpful.  If you could enable
kdb, that might help us get more information.

> xfs_repair, but the corrupted files were lost.

What does xfs_repair tell you now?  Does it find any problems?

If you go back to an older kernel (perhaps the released 1.0.2 kernel) does
the problem go away?

-Eric