Re: ext3 on raid5 failure

[Bas Mevissen <ml@basmevissen.nl>]

Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>
>>
>>sfhq:/mnt/data/1/lost+found# ls -l
>>total 76
>>d-wSr-----    2 1212680233 136929556    49152 Jun  7  2008 #16370
>>-rwx-wx---    1 1628702729 135220664    45056 May  4  1974 #16380
> 
> 
> Ok, this looks like random garbage has gotten written into inode table.
> 
> If you can make this happen consistently with 2.6 and not with 2.4,
> then that would be useful to know.  There may be some kind of race
> condition or problem with either the raid5 code, or the combination of
> raid5 plus ext3.  It's unlikely this kind of error would be caused by
> a flaw in the ext3 code alone, since this is indicative of complete
> garbage written to the inode table, or a block intended for another
> location on disk getting written to the inode table.  The natural
> suspect is at the block device layer and below.
> 

I've seen this kind of problems on my notebook too. Among others, over 
600MB of a huge cache directory (from a news reader) was having "funny" 
permissions. Maybe more files were affected. I used fsck.ext3 and 
changed the attributes with chmod.

It may be caused by crashes of the notebook (power failure and 
suspend/resume failure), but I would expect that the administration of 
the fs would survive that, as it did for years. Actually, the last time 
I had filesystem corruption was in kernel 1.2.xx days...

As my notebook is not using raid, I suspect something in the ext3 code. 
Kernel is 2.6.1 with ACPI, acpi-dsdt and swsusp2 patches.

Regards,

Bas.