[Question] Does the kernel ignore errors writng to disk?

mike.miller
2005-04-27T18:39:59Z

Hello All,
I have observed some behavior under certain failure conditions that seems as if the kernel may be ignoring write errors to disk.
During very heavy read/write io if we force a disk to fail requests continue to be submitted until the controllers queue is full. Ultimately, the requests are timed out by the controller. When this happens we see filesystem corruption. Sometimes it's the file data, other times it's filesystem metadata that has been timed out and failed. Either way its obviously undesirable behavior.
It looks like the OS/filesystem (ext2/3 and reiserfs) does not wait for for a successful completion. Is this assumption correct?

Thanks,
mikem