Re: EXT4 ENOSPC Bug

Theodore Tso
2009-02-18T02:30:17Z

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 02:08:21PM -0600, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> FWIW my problem seems to be different than others have encountered; mine
> persists past reboot, while other reporters have said that a reboot
> (remount) makes the problem go away.

It might or might not be the same problem, since the reporters were
doing this on a mounted root partition, and on a filesystem quite a
bit larger than your test filesystem; so it could be that the act of
shutting down and rebooting created/deleted various pid files, and
purturbed the filesystem to make the problem go away.

The other possibility is that it is the flex_bg specific counters
which were introduced specifically for find_group_flex. I'm not wild
about them since they mean we have to take an extra flex_bg specific
spin lock for every block and inode allocation. The Orlov algorithm
only needs the information when allocating directories, and since
those are rarer than file allocations, I think it should be OK to
simply sum up the necessary fields at directory allocation time
instead of trying to maintain separate counters (which could possibly
get corrupted, although I couldn't see a way that they could be
getting out of sync with reality).

- Ted