Random file system corruption in 3.17 (not BTRFS related...?)

[Robert White <rwhite@pobox.com>]

Howdy,

So I run several gentoo systems and I upgraded two of them to kernel 3.17.0

One using BTRFS for root.
One using ext3 for root (via the ext4 driver)

_Both_ systems exhibited strange behavior (long pauses and then hangs 
requiring hard-power) within several hours. Both then had random 
filesystem damage.

On the BTRFS system much of my browser settings for firefox were 
trashed, particularly the cookies and saved conifigurations for add-ons 
(like which sites had scripts enabled/disabled in no-script) etc.

On the ext3/4 system there were several corruptions including a 
pipe/special file with a large non-zero size that required I do a "fsck 
-fyD /dev/sda3" to repair. (one comment from fsck was that the 
pipe/special file "looked like a directory" or some such)

So I can say that corruption is taking place, but I suspect it is _not_ 
happening in the BTRFS specific code.

(ASIDE: both systems are older amd64 using built-in radeon display 
hardware.)