reiser4 corruption problem (maybe related to "Broken reiser4 FS")

reiser4 corruption problem (maybe related to "Broken reiser4 FS")

[Michael Weissenbacher]

i've tested reiser4 on a spare partition to see how well it would work 
for me. unfortunately i hit some corruption problem. it seems perfectly 
reproducable, so hardware error is very unlikely.

first some details on my system:
AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2400+
512 MB DDR-RAM (tested with memtest)
MSI K7N2G board (nforce2 chipset)
hard disk for testing: MAXTOR 6L080J4 (80GB), partitioned like:
    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1               1        4866    39086113+  83  Linux
/dev/hdb2            4867        9732    39086145   83  Linux
criminal mnt # uname -a
Linux criminal 2.6.8.1-mm4 #4 Wed Aug 25 01:34:48 CEST 2004 i686 AMD 
Athlon(tm) XP 2400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
the distro is gentoo and i use reiser4progs1.0.1

the test i did is rather simple: i have a 2.3GB .tar.bz2 file that 
cotains 66588 files and about 3.1GB of data. in the first test i 
formatted /dev/hdb1 as reiser4 and /dev/hdb2 as reiser3. i extracted the 
.tar.bz2 on both of them. after that i umounted both and ran a fsck on 
them. the reiser3 partition was ok, but the reiser4 partition was 
corrupted.

ok, but what's really intersting now:
i reformatted both partitions and switched hdb1 to reiser3 and hdb2 to 
reiser4. i extracted the same file on both and what happens? exaclty the 
same corrutions now on hdb2 (at least the count is the same and the 
errors look very similar)! and again reiser3 is ok!

i put the output of both tests into a file that is available at
http://www.dermichi.com/ablage/reiser4/reiser4_troubles.txt

i've already had the exact same problems before, i mean errors like:
FSCK: Directory [109e8:416c7400000000:109ee] (dir40), node [216782], 
item [1],
unit [22]: entry has wrong offset
[109ee:0(NAME):142657765726275:6e6746fc72416e77:135160352fe624]. Should be
[109ee:0(NAME):142657765726275:6e6746fc72416e77:13514d8cfe19f4].
while doing random other things on reiser4 partitions and fsck'ing 
afterwards. using --build-fs created lots of files under lost+found and 
i started over. i will leave the fs this time, maybe i can try some 
things to find the cause of the problem.

anyone got an idea?

thanks,
michael weissenbacher

Re: reiser4 corruption problem (maybe related to "Broken reiser4 FS")

[Francesco Biscani]

Hi,

On Friday 27 August 2004 01:15, Michael Weissenbacher wrote:
> criminal mnt # uname -a
> Linux criminal 2.6.8.1-mm4 #4 Wed Aug 25 01:34:48 CEST 2004 i686 AMD
> Athlon(tm) XP 2400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
> the distro is gentoo and i use reiser4progs1.0.1

This may be a long shot, but from the readme on kernel.org it seems that 
2.6.8.1-mm4 could have random breakage:

"- This kernel has an x86 patch which alters the copy_*_user() functions so
  they will return -EFAULT on a fault rather than the number of bytes which
  remain to be copied.  This is a bit of an experiment, because this seems to
  be the preferred API for those functions.   It's a see-what-breaks thing.

  And things will break.  If weird behaviour is observed, please revert
  usercopy-return-EFAULT.patch and send a report."

So maybe you could try 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 amd see if the problem persists. I've 
heard other users having problems with that particular -mm release and 
reiser4.

> thanks,
> michael weissenbacher

Regards,

  Francesco

Re: reiser4 corruption problem (maybe related to "Broken reiser4 FS")

[Michael Weissenbacher]

> So maybe you could try 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 amd see if the problem persists. I've 
> heard other users having problems with that particular -mm release and 
> reiser4.
today i've switched to 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 and i'm running the tests again 
now. for the moment it looks like two different problems: one is data 
corruption and the other is related to using german umlauts in file 
names. i'll get back later to report the results.

thanks for your time
michael

fsck.reiser4 problem (was: reiser4 corruption problem)

[Michael Weissenbacher]

> i've already had the exact same problems before, i mean errors like:
> FSCK: Directory [109e8:416c7400000000:109ee] (dir40), node [216782], 
> item [1],
> unit [22]: entry has wrong offset
> [109ee:0(NAME):142657765726275:6e6746fc72416e77:135160352fe624]. Should be
> [109ee:0(NAME):142657765726275:6e6746fc72416e77:13514d8cfe19f4].
> while doing random other things on reiser4 partitions and fsck'ing 
> afterwards. using --build-fs created lots of files under lost+found and 
> i started over. i will leave the fs this time, maybe i can try some 
> things to find the cause of the problem.
i've investigated this problem further the last days and came to the 
following conclusions:
- 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 has a bug that affects all filesystems (pointed out 
earlier today). so don't use if you love your data ;)
- reiser4 is stable for me on 2.6.8.1-mm4 (i compared the directories 
with diff and there were no differences)
- the problem with fsck.reiser4 mentioned above persists. it does not 
like some file names on my partition and then thinks that there are 
fatal corruptions. using "fsck.reiser4 --build-fs" actually destroys 
some data then by moving some correct files to lost+found. the filenames 
fsck does not like all contain german umlauts. but otoh there are 
filenames with umlauts that are ok!

here are some filenames that fail:
BewerbungFürAnwaltsbüro.doc
Graphik01Markenidentität.sxd
SkriptumzumSeminarFühren.doc
WieTeamseffizientwerdenkönnen.doc

but otoh these work:
WerbeKärntnerBallonwerbung.sxw
Vo 08 - 29. März 2001.pdf
TschöranKirche.jpg
VölkermarktKircheGross.jpg

i know that it's never a good idea to use such characters in a file 
name, but tell this to the users ... hopeless!
as i already mentioned earlier, this is with reiserfsprogs-1.0.1

what i learned: don't trust fsck.reiser4 if it says there is corruption 
(yes i know, it could have read README before... sigh)

Michael

Re: fsck.reiser4 problem (was: reiser4 corruption problem)

[Adrian Ulrich]

Hello,


> - 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 has a bug that affects all filesystems (pointed out 
> earlier today). so don't use if you love your data ;)

Can you tell us more about this bug?

(I'm using 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 and would like to know, what will happen ;) )

Re: fsck.reiser4 problem

[Michael Weissenbacher]

>>- 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 has a bug that affects all filesystems (pointed out 
>>earlier today). so don't use if you love your data ;)
> Can you tell us more about this bug?
> (I'm using 2.6.9-rc1-mm1 and would like to know, what will happen ;) )
See:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=109360433916523&w=2
and the mail in the reiserfs-list by Christian Mairhuber, subject "Re: 
reiserfs3 filesystem corruption?"
the bottom line is: there are problems with files that are exactly the 
size of a multiple of 4096, they are truncated by 4096 bytes...

Michael