system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

[Skip Collins]

After running 2.4.0-test11 for a while, my system would occasionally
hang during heavy disk activity resulting in a corrupt ext2 filesystem.
Fortunately, none of the damage has been irrecoverable. I checked
linux-kernel to see if anyone else was seeing the same thing. The recent
threads on corruption seemed to be consistent with the behavior I saw:
ide disk access light remains lit, system hangs, fsck finds bad inodes.
I think test12-pre5 was supposed to fix the problem. But after upgrading
my kernel, I can still get the errors. 

I have a 900MHz Athlon/Asus A7V mobo system with an onboard ata100
promise controller. I have only had problems when my ata100/udma5
harddrive is connected to the promise controller. Using the ATA66 ide
bus eliminates the problem. I typically see the corruption when copying
large (~1GB) files such as vmware virtual disks. It also happens
frequently inside vmware when doing heavy disk access things like
installing software or defragging a win2000 virtual disk.

For now I am going to fall back to the slower ide bus. But I wanted to
let people know that there still may be problems with ext2 corruption in
the latest test kernel.

sc
please cc any replies to me
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Re: system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

[Mohammad A. Haque]

I'd be more inclined to think its the combination of drive/controller
more than an ext2fs problem. If it was a fs corruption issue, you should
still see it on the slower bus.

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Skip Collins wrote:
> I have a 900MHz Athlon/Asus A7V mobo system with an onboard ata100
> promise controller. I have only had problems when my ata100/udma5
> harddrive is connected to the promise controller. Using the ATA66 ide
> bus eliminates the problem. I typically see the corruption when copying
> large (~1GB) files such as vmware virtual disks. It also happens
> frequently inside vmware when doing heavy disk access things like
> installing software or defragging a win2000 virtual disk.
>
> For now I am going to fall back to the slower ide bus. But I wanted to
> let people know that there still may be problems with ext2 corruption in
> the latest test kernel.
>

-- 

=====================================================================
Mohammad A. Haque                              http://www.haque.net/
                                               mhaque@haque.net

  "Alcohol and calculus don't mix.             Project Lead
   Don't drink and derive." --Unknown          http://wm.themes.org/
                                               batmanppc@themes.org
=====================================================================

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Re: system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

[Udo A. Steinberg]

Skip Collins wrote:
> 
> I have a 900MHz Athlon/Asus A7V mobo system with an onboard ata100
> promise controller. I have only had problems when my ata100/udma5
> harddrive is connected to the promise controller. Using the ATA66 ide
> bus eliminates the problem. I typically see the corruption when copying
> large (~1GB) files such as vmware virtual disks. It also happens
> frequently inside vmware when doing heavy disk access things like
> installing software or defragging a win2000 virtual disk.

I also have an A7V and both of my IBM IDE drives are connected to the
Promise controller, running in UDMA-5 mode. There hasn't been any
corruption on either of the drives that had to do with UDMA-5 mode.
And the ext2 bugs that 2.4 kernels had, have been fixed in the latest
versions.

What drive are you using? AFAIR, Andre Hedrick once said certain Maxtor
drives aren't quite safe with DMA.

-Udo.
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Re: system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

[Skip Collins]

"Udo A. Steinberg" wrote:

> What drive are you using? AFAIR, Andre Hedrick once said certain Maxtor
> drives aren't quite safe with DMA.

Using an IBM 45GB udma5 capable drive. The problems only occur under
_heavy_ disk activity.  I have -d 1 -c 3 -m 16 set.

Have you tried thrashing your drive for an extended time? Try repeatedly
copying more than one GB file simultaneously.

Perhaps this is not relevant, but I have only run into the problem when
manipulating vmware virtual disk files in some way, both inside and
outside of vmware itself. This is probably because these are the only
large files I have dealt with since installing a 2.4 kernel. But could
some aspect of the structure of these files, such as large holes, be
triggering the corruption?

sc
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Re: system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

[Andre Hedrick]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Udo A. Steinberg wrote:

> I also have an A7V and both of my IBM IDE drives are connected to the
> Promise controller, running in UDMA-5 mode. There hasn't been any
> corruption on either of the drives that had to do with UDMA-5 mode.
> And the ext2 bugs that 2.4 kernels had, have been fixed in the latest
> versions.
> 
> What drive are you using? AFAIR, Andre Hedrick once said certain Maxtor
> drives aren't quite safe with DMA.

WHOA!!!!  That was more than 3 years ago but that is not to day.
I have been working with them internally to make things work with Linux.
They have the fastest drive to date.  When running internal benchmarks one
can see XFER rates that go beyond 85MB/sec.

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
CTO Timpanogas Research Group
EVP Linux Development, TRG
Linux ATA Development

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Re: system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

[Dan Hollis]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Udo A. Steinberg wrote:
> What drive are you using? AFAIR, Andre Hedrick once said certain Maxtor
> drives aren't quite safe with DMA.

Depends on the controller. Maxtor drives play badly with Highpoint
controllers, but are OK with Promise.

-Dan

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Re: system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

[Tobias Ringstrom]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Skip Collins wrote:
> For now I am going to fall back to the slower ide bus. But I wanted to
> let people know that there still may be problems with ext2 corruption in
> the latest test kernel.

If your kernel halts, you should not be surprised if you get file system
errors.  You need a journalling filesystem to solve that, and even then,
you will probably loose data.  The magix sysrq can help you sometimes, but
certainly not if your disk (controller) is stuck.

/Tobias


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Re: system hang and corrupt ext2 filesystem with test12-pre5

[Andre Hedrick]

I have not tested of checked the nature of the PCD20265 which is the
onboard version.


On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Skip Collins wrote:

> After running 2.4.0-test11 for a while, my system would occasionally
> hang during heavy disk activity resulting in a corrupt ext2 filesystem.
> Fortunately, none of the damage has been irrecoverable. I checked
> linux-kernel to see if anyone else was seeing the same thing. The recent
> threads on corruption seemed to be consistent with the behavior I saw:
> ide disk access light remains lit, system hangs, fsck finds bad inodes.
> I think test12-pre5 was supposed to fix the problem. But after upgrading
> my kernel, I can still get the errors. 
> 
> I have a 900MHz Athlon/Asus A7V mobo system with an onboard ata100
> promise controller. I have only had problems when my ata100/udma5
> harddrive is connected to the promise controller. Using the ATA66 ide
> bus eliminates the problem. I typically see the corruption when copying
> large (~1GB) files such as vmware virtual disks. It also happens
> frequently inside vmware when doing heavy disk access things like
> installing software or defragging a win2000 virtual disk.
> 
> For now I am going to fall back to the slower ide bus. But I wanted to
> let people know that there still may be problems with ext2 corruption in
> the latest test kernel.
> 
> sc
> please cc any replies to me
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
> 

Andre Hedrick
CTO Timpanogas Research Group
EVP Linux Development, TRG
Linux ATA Development

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