Re: [patch] linux likes to kill bad inodes

[Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>]

On Wednesday, April 25, 2001 10:01:20 PM +0200 Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
wrote:

> Hi!
> 
>> > Hi!
>> > 
>> > I had a temporary disk failure (played with acpi too much). What
>> > happened was that disk was not able to do anything for five minutes
>> > or so. When disk recovered, linux happily overwrote all inodes it
>> > could not read while disk was down with zeros -> massive disk
>> > corruption.
>> > 
>> > Solution is not to write bad inodes back to disk.
>> > 
>> 
>> Wouldn't we rather make it so bad inodes don't get marked dirty at all?
> 
> I guess this is cheaper: we can mark inode dirty at 1000 points, but
> you only write it at one point.

Whoops, I worded that poorly.  To me, it seems like a bug to dirty a bad
inode.  If this patch works, it is because somewhere, somebody did
something with a bad inode, and thought the operation worked (otherwise,
why dirty it?).  

So yes, even if we dirty them in a 1000 different places, we need to find
the one place that believes it can do something worthwhile to a bad inode.

-chris