2.6.22-rc1 killed my ext3 filesystem cleanly unmounted

[Theodore Tso]

On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 04:35:29PM +0200, Martin Mokrejs wrote:
> >  How do you know that the corruption was caused by 2.6.21-rc1 ?
> >  Isn't it possible that the corruption was created by an earlier
> >  kernel, but only detected when a forced fsck was run - which just
> >  happened to be while you were running 2.6.21-rc1 ...
> > 
> >  My point is that, as far as I can see, there's nothing tying
> >  2.6.21-rc1 specifically to this corruption... or?
> 
> You might be right, but I thought maybe more probably is the cause in kernel
> as that is what I have changed recently. ;) Or maybe someone can at leats say
> "No, no changes to be considered between 2.6.20.6 and 2.6.22-rc1.". ;)

Well, given that your e2fsck transcript started with this:

> /dev/hda3 has been mounted 38 times without being checked, check forced

#1, This is why periodic checks are a good thing; it catches problems
that could stay hidden and result in data loss sooner rather later.

#2, It seems unlikely tha tthe problem is tied to 2.6.21-rc1.  The
filesystme corruption could have happened at any time in the last 38
mounts.  It could be caused by hardware problems, or software
problems; there really is no telling.

#3, With respect to your use of gentoo's unstable e2fsprogs, it seems
unlikely that the corruptions were caused by gentoo's e2fsprogs.  The
being said, Gentoo includes a number of development patches that I
wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable putting into production, and
indeed haven't been checked into SCM yet.  So it makes me nervous, but
I doubt it's related to your specific problem.

Regards,

						- Ted