Re: Corruption on ext3 with XFS kernel

[Juri Haberland <juri@koschikode.com>]

Simon Matter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have seven IBM deathstar 60G disks here which have been replaced. I
> want to use four of them in my home server so I wanted to do some tests
> to make sure they don't break in the first week. I have connected four
> drives to a Promise Ultra100TX2 IDE controller and put it into my test
> server. The box is running kernel-2.4.18-18SGI_XFS_1.2pre3. I have
> created a softraid5 on the disks creating a 180G device. I then created
> an ext3 fs with default settings. Mounted the fs on /mnt/md9, mounted my
> real servers data on /mnt/nfs. Then I used cp -a /mnt/nfs
> /mnt/md9/nfs[n] five times creating five identical copies of the nfs
> mounted data (/mnt/md9/nfs1, /mnt/md9/nfs2...) with a size of 28G in
> 16500 file in each copy (143G used / 81%).
> Then I did two times five diff's running at the same time and I was very
> surprised what came out:

[SNIP]

> Now, it looks like a problem with ext3. My question is, could it have
> _something_ to do with the XFS patch in this kernel? Did anybody do
> similar tests? Unfortunately this box has XFS root so I can't just
> switch to vanilla or original RedHat kernel and every test takes me
> ~1day. Is there a way to find out what's going wrong here?

You can try to apply the three bugfix-patches for 2.4.20/ext3 at
http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/ext3/ (see "Updates for the 2.4.20
kernel").

Regards,
Juri