Re: Strange disk corruption with Linux >= 2.6.13

[Bodo Eggert <harvested.in.lkml@7eggert.dyndns.org>]

Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br> wrote:
> On Sep 28 2005, Nigel Cunningham wrote:

>> 3) Is the corruption only ever in memory, or seen on disk too?
> 
> I have noticed the problem mostly on disk. One strange situation was
> when I was untarring a kernel tree (compressed with bzip2) and in the
> middle of the extraction, bzip2 complained that the thing was
> corrupted.
> 
> I removed what was extracted right away and tried again to extract the
> tree (at this point, suspecting even that something in software had
> problems). The problem with bzip2 occurred again. Then, I rebooted the
> system an the problem magically went away.

I have a similar problem:
It's a corruption while reading data from the HDD into the cache.
The affected page will contain (pseudo?)random data in the first four
bytes (at least on my system it did).

If you waited long enough, the cache page would be discarded and the next
read from the disk would be correct. However, if it happens e.g. in an
inode block, the corruption may find it's way to the disk and/or fubar
your data.

This happens mostly if there are concurrent DMA transfers like playing
sound or watching TV on bttv cards. I'm affected by the later cause,
setting no_overlay reduced it.

-- 
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verbreiteten Lügen zu sabotieren.