Re: Exaggerated swap usage

Marc-Christian Petersen
2002-12-03T10:06:24Z

On Tuesday 03 December 2002 01:59, you wrote:

Hi Andrea,

> this is the interesting one. Did you run any unstable kernel/driver
> software combination recently or maybe you got oopsed or crashes?
nope, no oops, no crash, afaik no unstable kernel/drivers. Kernel is yours ;)
and drivers, hmm, just intel i815, eepro100. That happend after some hours of
uptime and just doing "rm -rf linux-old"

> journaling sometime gives a false sense of reliability, you've to keep
> in mind that unless you know why you had to reboot w/o a clean unmount
> you should always force an e2fsck -f/reiserfsck in single user mode at
> the next boot, no matter of journaling. If the machine crashed because
Yep, I always do a forced fsck in case of that.

> of a kernel oops or similar skipping the filesystemcheck at the very
> next boot could left the fs corrupted for a long time until you notice
> it possibly while running an unrelated kernel. So if you crashed
> recently and you didn't run any e2fsck -f that could explain it. I doubt
I run e2fsck -fy every time after a crash. Fortunately it doesn't happen so
often :-)

> ...
> don't know the details of the bug at the time of the next reboot so
> normally an e2fsck -f is always required after a kernel crash, this
> can't be automated simply because if the kernel is crashed we can't
> write to the superblock to notify e2fsck about it, so at the next boot
> e2fsck will always think replying the log was enough).
yep. I tried to remove that 00_umount-against-unused-dirty-inodes-race fix and
after that (now 5 hours uptime) doing only copying and deleting, that ext3fs
error is away.

> Of course your problem could be explained by a bad cable or whatever
> else hardware failure too. At the moment I doubt it's a problem in the
> common code of my tree or mainline.
seems it's a problem in the umount-against-unused-dirty-inodes-race fix or if
the fix "is the right way" the problem is located somewhere else what
triggers the problem of your patch.

ciao, Marc