Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 17 Jun 1998 21:23:26 -0400 (EDT) | From | "Richard B. Johnson" <> | Subject | Re: ext2 fs not properly updated upon dismount. |
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[SNIPPED all] Statistics only confuse the issue. Disks are only mounted/unmounted using two system calls. If the device was marked as properly dismounted, which is what fsck checks and states, then the device was dismounted. You don't care about version numbers of mount/dismount/...etc. You also don't care about C-runtime libraries. The system-call was executed with the proper device name as a parameter. It doesn't make any difference how the name got there nor how the call was generated.
If corruption only occurs when disks are dismounted, which is what it seems, then you can rule out drivers and physical devices. These things don't know why a write occurred --many writes occur during normal operation over many hours of use.
The ext2 file systems are cached. It is important that everything that was buffered gets written to the physical device when it is dismounted. It looks as though some cached inode data was not written. It also looks as though this problem occurs when a greater amount of virtual RAM is available because a swap file is installed.
There is more physical RAM available for caching when a swap file is installed. There will probably be more dirty inodes cached under these conditions. This is probably why the problem occurs when a swap file is installed.
What needs to be done, is a check of the fs-cache code has to be made to see if there is a "sneak-path" that could prevent all the cached data from being written to the device during the dismount operation. A hint of where to look is in the evidence about the installed swap file.
There are at least two experts on the ext2 file-system. I am pretty sure that at least one is reviewing the reported problem. In the meantime, including the '-f' option in the startup script that mounts file-systems after a check, may prevent a creeping problems that eventually cause errors that can't be readily repaired.
Cheers, Dick Johnson ***** FILE SYSTEM MODIFIED ***** Penguin : Linux version 2.1.105 on an i586 machine (66.15 BogoMips). Warning : It's hard to remain at the trailing edge of technology.
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