Re: 1352 NUL bytes at the end of a page? (was Re: Assertion `s && s->tree' failed: The saga continues.)

Linus Torvalds
2004-05-16T03:58:56Z

On Sat, 15 May 2004, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> Two hours so far here.
>
> bix:/usr/src> ~/clone.sh
> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
>
> That's 2.6.6-mm2+, 2GB 4-way x86.

I think Steven's machine (according to an earlier 'dmesg') has something
like 384MB of RAM and just one PIII-450 CPU.

With that setup, he's likely getting a lot of IO (and possibly even
swapping). The BK disk working set for the kernel archive is something
like half a gig per tree, I think.

In contrast, your nicer machine will do the whole stress-test basically
totally cached (well, BK will force writeback with fsync, but it will all
be pretty synchronous with nothing else going on).

So if it's IO-related or happens when swapping...

But again, neither of those should usually cause that kind of strange
partial-page corruption.

Linus