Re: Patch 1300 & rpm issue with 1.3.0

[Steve Lord <lord@sgi.com>]

On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 17:51, Russell Cattelan wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 14:41, Foris, Jim (MED) wrote:
> > Eric Sandeen wrote:
> > > On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Kai Leibrandt wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > >>That's just what I was thinking; is rpm only an indication that other
> > >>apps might have issues as well? If so, how do we identify them and
> > >>rectify the problems? In the kernel, or in the app?
> > > 
> > > 
> > > That's not clear to me yet, but we have dome some O_DIRECT stresstesting
> > > and it's all been fine.  So this doesn't seem to be a problem with
> > > O_DIRECT in general, which makes me think it might be the app.
> > > 
> > 
> > Using "strace" on a RH 2.4.20-20.9.XFS1.3.0 system to follow what "rpm" does
> > during an install, the key difference seems to be the following sequence:
> > 
> > WORKS (created a EXT3 partition, copied /var/lib/rpm/* to it, then mounted it at 
> > /var/lib/rpm)
> I this ext2 or ext3?
> ext2 will turn off O_DIRECT after the open call
> ext3 was suppose to, eric has a new patch to fix that.

This looks like memory alignment of the write buffer. The alignment of
the memory may be constrained differently, possibly ext3 is not doing
O_DIRECT so is not constraining I/O alignment. It would be good to see
the address of the buffer passed into the write call. 

Steve