2.3.x, FS corruption?

[Philippe Strauss]

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Hello linux-kernel fans,

I've noticed, when I'm running either plain vanilla 2.3.39 or 2.3.40, upgrading
a pile of debian packages thru apt (download via ftp, temporary spooling of
the .deb in /var/apt/cache, then bulk installation of each .deb), the
apt software stop on an error, due to a corruption of a freshly installed
package file list (a file containing the full path of each file installed by
a particular package).

It may be apt or dpkg which are broken, but the thing is I've never had
such a corruption with 2.2.x, only 2.3.x

Hmmm I'm compiling my kernel with:

Linux version 2.3.40 (root@leeloo) (gcc version 2.95.2 19991109 (Debian GNU/Linux)) #1 Sun Jan 23 01:23:18 CET 2000

Here's one such corrupted file:
hexdump -c /var/lib/dpkg/info/smsclient.list

(I'm using 4096 bytes block size on ext2)
(notice the corrupted garbage take just the first 4096 bytes of the file.
After that it's the normal text file).

0000000 233   ~  \0  \0  \f  \0 001  \0   .  \0  \0  \0 277   }  \0  \0
0000010 364 017 002  \0   .   .  \0  \0   W 200  \0  \0 020  \0  \b  \0
0000020   p   o   s   t   i   n   s   t 251 200  \0  \0   0  \0 005  \0
0000030   p   r   e   r   m  \0  \0  \0 333 200  \0  \0 020  \0 006  \0
0000040   s   h   l   i   b   s  \0  \0   Z 201  \0  \0 020  \0  \a  \0
0000050   m   d   5   s   u   m   s  \0   F 202  \0  \0 250 017  \a  \0
0000060   c   o   n   t   r   o   l  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0
0000070  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0
*
0001000   s   e   r   v   i   c   e   s   /   t   e   l   e   n   o   r
0001010  \n   /   e   t   c   /   s   m   s   c   l   i   e   n   t   /
0001020   s   e   r   v   i   c   e   s   /   p   a   g   e   n   e   t
[snip - the rest of the file is normal]

Cheers.