Re: Linux 2.4.5-ac14

Alexander Viro
2001-06-16T07:38:10Z

On 16 Jun 2001, Andi Kleen wrote:

> "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com> writes:
>
> > Alan Cox writes:
> > > Because right now I dont consider the 2.4.6 page cache ext2 stuff safe
> > > enough to merge. I'm letting someone else be the sucide squad.. so far it
> > > looks like it is indeed fine but I want to wait and see more yet
> >
> > If it means anything it has already withstanded a few
> > cerebus-->fsck_check-->cerebus rounds on machines here
> > in my lab.
>
> ... it also seems to make ppc not boot anymore.

OK, after looking at the bug report things smell very strange:

* kernel had barfed on lookup for /dev/console.
* kernel had found /dev - right inode number, etc.
* read_cache_page(inode->i_mapping, n, ext2_readpage) on it
gave all-zeroes for each page within first 32Kb (size of /dev on box in
question).
* filesystem is not corrupted.
* all that stuff had happened with cold caches.
* kernel was 2.4.6-pre3 + some unspecified modifications.

Very odd. Could somebody try vanilla 2.4.6-pre1 on a PPC box? I _really_
doubt that it might be an architecture-specific problem in directory
code - it would simply fail the lookup for /dev in that case.

I'll try to find a PPC nearby, but it may be tricky on weekend. So if
somebody wants to help... Notice that problem was on read-only mount,
so it can be tested without risking fs corruption - just try to boot
with init=/bin/sh and do ls -lR, etc.