Re: Linux 2.4.5-ac14

Olaf Hering
2001-06-17T20:47:32Z

On Sat, Jun 16, Alexander Viro wrote:

>
>
> 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.

Al,

the pre2 didnt boot on the POWER3 SMP box. pre3 does (runs in 32bit
mode).
It could be a compiler bug because we have some trouble right now with
our toolchain on ppc32.
Right now it runs pre3 fine with a binary from the same compiler etc.

I have seen this only on that box.
Is it possible that a ppc64 writes some bogus values to the disk? I had
a ppc64 binary running but I wasnt too excited about it because it
misses some essential stuff like autofs. So I booted the 2.4.2 ppc32
kernel again with no trouble for a while..

Gruss Olaf

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