Re: ext4 increased intolerance to unclean shutdown?

[Maxim Levitsky <maximlevitsky@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 00:28 -0400, Parag Warudkar wrote:
> So I have been experimenting with various root file systems on my
> laptop running latest git. This laptop some times has problems waking
> up from sleep and that results in it needing a hard reset and
> subsequently unclean file system.
> 
> Initially I had ext3 on and never really had any visible filesystem
> issues for quite some time even with hard resets after wakeup. Then I
> switched to ext4 and first time it failed to wakeup from sleep fsck
> took me through quite a bit of errors - but after fixing them it
> immediately went and hit EXT4-fs error and it was unusable there
> onwards until (if I recall correctly) I found the file path associated
> with the inode relating to that message and used debugfs to delete the
> file only to have segfaults on subsequent boot. That was some time
> ago.
> 
> Meanwhile I was running xfs root and had the laptop fail to wakeup a
> fair number of times with no visible file system related issue.
> 
> This evening I needed to secure erase the abused SSD and that gave me
> a chance to retry ext4. But as bad luck would have it, the laptop just
> failed to wakeup and had to be reset. Sure enough, a ton of errors
> needed to be fixed when fsck went through the ext4 root fs. I had
> /boot as 8gb ext3 on same disk and that one showed no errors. But the
> bad part was it still failed to boot to desktop (GDM could not write
> to authorization file) after repairing the ext4 root fs. I forced
> another fsck on the root fs and it (again) found another handful of
> things to fix. So now it boots to desktop but some startup service
> still fails to start or stop.
> 
> So what's going on? I understand all bets are off when you have to
> hard reset - but based on my anecdotal experience it seems to me like
> ext4 has grown more intolerant to unclean shutdowns. Is this to be
> expected or it's just sheer coincidence?
> 
> Curious to understand the reason if any - don't care about the data
> loss part, as I had purposefully not kept anything important on the
> filesystems.

I had similar experience, and I say it all begin in 2.6.32.
see, http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=125486358632602&w=2

In fact I had never seen ext3/4 fsck in action before.


Best regards,
	Maxim Levitsky





> 
> Thanks
> 
> Parag
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