From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: eazgwmir@umail.furryterror.org (Zygo Blaxell) Subject: Re: Corrupted/unreadable journal: reiser vs. ext3 Date: 13 Feb 2003 17:49:16 -0500 Message-ID: References: <3E4AA902.86F15815@interface-ag.com> Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: reiserfs-list@namesys.com In article <3E4AA902.86F15815@interface-ag.com>, Dirk Schenkewitz wrote: >For me, it was alarming enough seeing ext3 drop the journal. In fact, >THAT was the point where I went to investigate in other directions >instead of blaming the filesystem. The kernel block device messages complaining about I/O errors from the device aren't sufficient to tell you that there is a serious problem? Or was this device silently corrupting data without reporting errors? >The only problem is, that putting a bad drive to eternal rest >might not solve the problem, as long as the REASON for the drive gone >bad stays uncovered. (I had that said drive in use for less than 4 >months (if my memory servers, er, serves my well) - it was like new. I've had disks that were DOA (literally--Medium Errors during partitioning and mke2fs, followed by mechanical noises and total failure in a matter of a few minutes). I've had several disks that failed a week or two after first installation. The M in MTBF is Mean, not Maximum or Minimum. For every disk that lasts 10 years or more, there's an equal and opposite disk that dies within a few minutes. >Hans Reiser wrote (in response to Anders Widman): >> If we handle the journal block error without downtime, the user will >> never chuck the hard drive, and that is bad in the longterm. > >Not agreed, unless you continue without a warning. I'd prefer to continue in read-only mode, and refuse further read-write mounts with an error until the filesystem is fscked. I really like systems that can still boot and let me (attempt to) run diagnostic tools even when they're otherwise really unhealthy. I don't care if recently written data is corrupt or missing--I probably didn't write to the diagnostic tools within the last journal interval, and if the filesystem is read-only I can't make any metadata corruption worse. I would think that most people notice that something's wrong if they can't write to their filesystems any more. I certainly wouldn't want the filesystem to be modified if there's something known to be wrong with the metadata. But if I can't read any of the data at all because some tiny part of it is suspicious, I just get annoyed. :-P -- Zygo Blaxell (Laptop) GPG = D13D 6651 F446 9787 600B AD1E CCF3 6F93 2823 44AD