public inbox for linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
To: Leo Davis <leo1783@yahoo.com>
Cc: xfs@oss.sgi.com
Subject: Re: fs corruption
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:05:32 +1000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20110412110532.GB31057@dastard> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <38287.10078.qm@web112901.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 03:51:20AM -0700, Leo Davis wrote:
> You have a corrupted free space btree.
> 
> Err... apologies for my ignorance, but what is a free space btree?

A tree that indexes the free space in the filesystem. Every time you
write a file or remove a file you are allocating or freeing space,
and these tree keep track of that free space.

If you want to know - at a high level - how XFS is structured (good
for understanding what a free space tree is), read this paper:

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/papers/xfs_usenix/index.html

It's from 1996, but still correct on all the major structural
details.

> I had serial trace from raid controller which i just checked and
> it logged some 'Loose cabling', but this was months back.....  not
> sure whether that can be the cause of this.. strange if that is
> the case since it's been a long time

it's possible that it took a couple of months to trip over a random
metadata corruption. I've seen that before in directory trees and
inode clusters where corruption is not detected until next time they
are read from disk....

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

_______________________________________________
xfs mailing list
xfs@oss.sgi.com
http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs

  reply	other threads:[~2011-04-12 11:02 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2011-04-12  9:33 fs corruption stress_buster
2011-04-12  9:49 ` Dave Chinner
2011-04-12 10:51   ` Leo Davis
2011-04-12 11:05     ` Dave Chinner [this message]
2011-04-12 11:37       ` Emmanuel Florac
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2011-04-25  5:47 Leo Davis

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=20110412110532.GB31057@dastard \
    --to=david@fromorbit.com \
    --cc=leo1783@yahoo.com \
    --cc=xfs@oss.sgi.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox