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SubjectRe: test8-pre2 fs corruption?


On Sun, 3 Sep 2000, Thomas Molina wrote:

> On Sun, 3 Sep 2000, Mohammad A. Haque wrote:
>
> > Hello
> >
> > Alot of my mailboxes have become corrupt after trying test8-pre2. I'm
> > back down to test7 and everything seems to be working ok so far. I was
> > able to forcibly corrupt a couple of mailboxes by reading unread mail
> > from about a week or so ago and exiting. The mailbox would then be
> > corrupt from allowing me to only get to messages up until last week
> > after manually editing the mailbox to remove the garbage in the file.
>
> Odd. I started seeing mailbox corruption the day before the first post
> showed up here. Since it was only one list (BUGTRAQ) and I'm still at
> pre7, I've ascribed it to a problem with the sender. The corruption
> shows up as weird characters at the end of the file. I only mention it
> because of the odd time-coincident nature of the error. I don't suppose
> there is a connection?

Fun... OK, folks. There was a bug in ext2 (and damn next to every other
local fs) since 2.3.7. Sometimes (depending on phase of moon, pagecache
contents and a bunch of other shit) truncate() leaves the tail of last
block not zeroed. Looks like it surfaced from time to time, but had been
mostly unnoticed. Something in the last kernels made it show up more
often.

I dearly hope that patch I've posted today will fix the bloody thing
for good. Because if it will not we've got something else to deal with.

As for the bug itself - look at the truncate_inode_pages() (part that does
zero-out of the partial page) and ask yourself: WTF will happen if
pagecache has nothing for that file? Had been there for more than a
year...


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