Linux-kernel mailing list archive 1998-31,: Re: Irritating ext2fs corruption

# Re: Irritating ext2fs corruption

Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@MIT.EDU)
Mon, 3 Aug 1998 18:53:52 -0400

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Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 00:22:08 +0200
From: Stefan Traby <stefan@sime.com>

> No, it's not a cache problem. The reason why you don't get the space
> back is because some process still has an open file descriptor on the
> file. The space won't be released until the file descriptor is closed.

Which open file descriptor ? (He wrote that the problem appears even after
unmount and remount...)
[No, I've _never_ seen such a problem]

That's not what he said. He said he didn't want to unmount the
filesystem, and wasn't unmounting the filesystem.

I interpreted his remarks and description of symptoms as being likely
caused by some process still having the image open, thus keeping the
disk space allocated. That process (or possibly loopback mount) is
probably also not dieing as part of the system shutdown, so the
filesystem is probably not getting unmounted as part of the shutdown,
and so you have an unceanly mounted disk where the disk space hasn't
been reclaimed yet.

It could be something else, but the bug report wasn't terribly clear,
and this was the best I could come up with. Given that no one else has
reported anything else like this (and I would get inundated with
complaints if this was happening in general), I'm for the moment
ascribing it to a system adminisrtation error as opposed to anything
else.

- Ted

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