Re: [Ext2-devel] Re: Htree ate my hard drive, was: post-halloween 0.2

[Duncan Sands <baldrick@wanadoo.fr>]

On Monday 04 November 2002 23:42, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 01:07:17AM -0700, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> > On Oct 31, 2002  07:27 +0100, Duncan Sands wrote:
> > > After a bit of switching back and forth between 2.4.19 and 2.5.44,
> > > fsck was run while booting 2.4.19 (the usual check because of >30
> > > mounts).  There was a message about optimizing directories.  Booting
> > > continued but (big surprise) X refused to run.  It turned out that some
> > > device files had vanished.
> > >
> > > tune2fs -O ^dir_index /dev/hdXXX
> > > to remove htree support.  No problems since then.
> >
> > I wonder if there is still a bug in the e2fsck code for re-hashing
> > directories?
>
> Possibly, but I'm more worried about why the fsck did a directory
> optimise on reboot, especially on the root filesystem (where /dev is
> usually stored).  Doing major fs surgery on a mounted, readonly
> filesystem is sort-of safe, but only if you reboot afterwards.
> Continuing and remounting read-write can cause all sorts of damage as
> the cached fs data no longer matches what's on disk.
>
> Duncan, did you have fsck set up to do a forced htree rebuild on
> reboot?

Hmmm, fsck is called from the debian checkroot init script which does
fsck -a -C
So I guess the answer is "no".

Duncan.

PS: I am using version 1.30-WIP of e2fsck.