Re: Version 2.4.1 has ext2 problems.

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Sat, 3 Feb 2001, Russell King wrote:

> Richard B. Johnson writes:
> > Files generated by e2fsck in lost+found cannot be removed.
> > # rm *
> > rm: cannot remove `#1006': Value too large for defined data type
> 
> Well, I can say that this isn't an isolated incident.  I was hitting 2.4.1
> hard last night on ARM, and ended up loosing my /usr and /var mountpoints
> and a few other files to this exact corruption.
> 
> I resorted to using debugfs to remove these entries, and re-running e2fsck.
> 
> Oh, the other interesting thing about it was that they had random modes
> (eg, 1066440) - e2fsck also complained about a large number of errors on
> the affected inodes (eg, various fields of the inode structure which should
> be zero, d_time stuff, etc).  Sorry, don't have the e2fsck logs, and I'm
> reluctant to try to reproduce it.
> 
[Snipped...]

Methinks that there a few problems(races?) that remain with this version.
The problem is that they the incidents occur at random and you wouldn't
want to deliberately produce them... The result is no file-system.

Hopefully, the on-going work will kill these bugs.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.1 on an i686 machine (799.53 BogoMips).

"Memory is like gasoline. You use it up when you are running. Of
course you get it all back when you reboot..."; Actual explanation
obtained from the Micro$oft help desk.