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

Steven Cole
2004-05-18T01:57:05Z

On Monday 17 May 2004 07:42 pm, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I'd really like to see this happen on some other machine though. It'd be
> > > funny if you have a dud disk drive or something.
> >
> > We can easily rule that out. Steven, do a
> >
> > dd if=/dev/zero of=USE_SOME_SPACE bs=1048576 count=500

I'll get to Larry's test a little later. Pizza's about to come out of the oven.

> >
> > which will eat up 500 MB and should eat up any bad blocks. I _really_
> > doubt it is a bad disk.
>
> Yes, me too. The sensitivity to CONFIG_PREEMPT makes that unlikely.
>
> Two things I'm not clear on:
>
> a) Has is been established that CONFIG_PREEMPT causes ppp to fail?

At the risk of a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, I'd say yes. I have not
seen ppp fail without PREEMPT. No PREEMPT, no ppp problems.

>
> b) Has the file corruption been observed when PPP was not in use at all?

No, at least I don't have any specific memory of corruption without ppp.

I made a fresh 3.9G reiserfs fs on my second disk, and cloned a kernel
tree to it. I can use it for testing, but its currently in sync with linux.bkbits.net/linux-2.5.

Later,
Steven