Bug Report

["Dipl.-Ing. Michael Niederle" <mniederle-RbZlAiThDcE@public.gmane.org>]

Hi!

Today I installed SIMPLUX on a freshly formatted 30GB partition on a pen drive.
I updated the whole system, compiled and installed the final version of the
2.6.30 kernel. I did not apply any further nilfs-patches. Everything worked
fine. Then (using the new kernel) I deleted several GB of old data. The garbage
collection worked really slow, so I changed the settings in nilfs_cleanerd.conf
as follows:

protection_period	900
selection_policy	timestamp
nsegments_per_clean	10
cleaning_interval	5
use_mmap
log_priority		info

Then I restarted the cleaner daemon and was happy to see now much more activity
on the pen-drive. The garbage collection claimed back MB after MB. I thought it
would take some time for the garbage collection to complete and left the room.
When I returned the machine was completely crashed (black screen - maybe due
to the screen saver). I could only reboot it via "ctrl-alt-sysrqst USB".

There was no background job during the time of the crash - just an idling
X-desktop (iceWM - so only very few running daemons).

The next reboot took half an hour! Here an excerpt from the kernel
log:

[    2.407501] usb-storage: device scan complete
[    2.456443] sd 2:0:0:1: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 1759.409004] segctord starting. Construction interval = 5 seconds, CP frequenc
[ 1759.421950] NILFS warning: mounting unchecked fs
[ 1759.456071] NILFS: recovery complete.

It seems nilfs read the whole partition - byte for byte. This would take
approximately the time spent. Wouldn't it suffice to read all segment headers
to recover? The pen drive can handle more than 2000 reads per second.

Before it (presumably) crashed the system the cleaner daemon had done a
nice job - freeing several GB of unused space (but not yet completed the
garbage collection).

Greetings, Michael