Re: ext3 extended attributes refcounting wrong?

[Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@csd.uu.se>]

Stephen C. Tweedie writes:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > On Thu, 2005-02-03 at 22:42, Mikael Pettersson wrote:
 > > I believe there is some accounting error in the ext3 code
 > > for the case when CONFIG_EXT3_FS_XATTR is not selected.
 > > 
 > > Whenever any one of my development boxes triggers an fsck
 > > at boot because some file system, usually /, has been mounted
 > > sufficiently many times, an inconsistency error occurs
 > 
 > In which kernel(s) exactly?  There was a fix for that applied fairly
 > recently upstream.

I've been seeing this over the last couple of months, with
(at least) 2.4.28 and newer, and 2.6.9 and newer standard kernels.
But since I dual boot and switch kernels often, I can't point
at any given kernel or kernel series as being the culprit.

How recent was that fix? Maybe I'm seeing the aftereffects of
pre-fix corruption?

 > > Extended attribute block N has reference count M, should be M'.
 > 
 > > This occurs on all my boxes, with different CPUs (x86/x86-64/ppc)
 > > and different chipsets (Intel, Promise, VIA, Apple), and basically
 > > the only commonalities are:
 > > - they dual boot the most recent 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, and I switch often
 > > - all file systems are ext3
 > > - all XATTR stuff is disabled
 > 
 > I'm not sure how you get this if all xattr stuff is disabled!  Are you
 > sure you're not using SELinux or ACLs, for example?

Absolutely. I use no xattrs, ACLs, or SELinux at all, and I always
disable those features in my kernels.

/Mikael