From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262580AbUERAB6 (ORCPT ); Mon, 17 May 2004 20:01:58 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262585AbUERAB6 (ORCPT ); Mon, 17 May 2004 20:01:58 -0400 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:59372 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262580AbUERAB5 (ORCPT ); Mon, 17 May 2004 20:01:57 -0400 Date: Mon, 17 May 2004 17:04:33 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: "Robert M. Stockmann" Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: ramdisk driver in 2.6.6 has a severe bug Message-Id: <20040517170433.0311c2e9.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: References: <20040517161943.37d826a3.akpm@osdl.org> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.7 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i586-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org "Robert M. Stockmann" wrote: > > Be aware of other problems when using the linux ramdisk driver, > loosing its contents. Especially the use of mkinitrd might result in > unexpected problems. googling for "kernel 2.6.6 ramdisk problem" shows lots > of people with problems mounting their root filesystems and loading modules > from ramdisk. Klaus Knopper (knoppix) is not amused, neither am i :) Well in that case perhaps something else broke. I've seen no such reports of recent regressions in the ramdisk driver. The two problems of which I am aware are: a) It loses its brains across umount. Seems that it's very rare that anyone actually cares about this, which is why it has not been fixed in well over a year. b) It loses data under heavy I/O loads. I _think_ this has been observed only on ppc64 and might be a cache writeback/invalidate thing. If there are new post-2.6.5 problems then I'm all ears.