Re: FS corruption and repair problem

Martin Steigerwald
2006-10-17T08:51:37Z

Am Dienstag 17 Oktober 2006 07:35 schrieb Jason White:

> Unfortunately, yes. The first I knew about it came in the form of i/o
> errors and processes terminating with error 990.

Hello Jason,

this is the error code XFS returns when it detects corruption. AFAIK it
has been changed to something more meaningful lately.

> After unmounting the backup fs I ran xfs_check, which reported no
> problems. Thus I suspect that in the case of the backup drive, the FS
> corruption was due to the 2.6.17 bug, since copying gigabytes of files
> to it failed to reproduce the problem, and all seems fine under 2.6.18.
>
> I am still pleased with XFS as I have been using it since 2001, and the
> only problems have been due to bugs that were quickly fixed by the
> developers, and most of these happened prior to the integration of XFS
> into the mainline.

Since 2.6.17.7 I had no fs corruption with XFS anymore. Neither on my
laptop nor on my workstation. On my laptop I had quite some issues with
2.6.16 which I omitted on my Workstation except 2.6.16rc1.

I am currently running 2.6.18 and am pretty pleased.

Make sure that write barriers are enabled (is default since 2.6.17, was
not the default 2.6.16 which IMHO at least partly contributed to my
problems with it). Umount an XFS partition, do tail -f /var/log/syslog or
tail -f /var/log/messages and mount it again. If XFS can't do write
barriers on your machine, it should put an error message into log. You
can find more about this is in the approbiate log entry.

Regards,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7