Intermittent ext3 corruption on external firewire Micronet 1.5Tb RAID on FC3

Stephen C. Tweedie sct at redhat.com
Fri May 27 15:13:35 UTC 2005


Hi,

On Sun, 2005-05-15 at 23:48, Joseph D. Wagner wrote:
> > May 15 04:03:30 localhost kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sdd1):
> > ext3_xattr_get: inode 63343526: bad block 165510584
> > May 15 04:03:34 localhost kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sdd1):
> > ext3_xattr_get: inode 63343381: bad block 141623810
> > May 15 04:03:34 localhost kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sdd1):
> > ext3_xattr_get: inode 63947123: bad block 203323361
> 
> These errors cannot be caused by a bug in the file system.

Yes they can, and almost certainly were: I'm not sure why you'd assert
otherwise.  These messages are coming straight back from ext3 when it
doesn't find the right magic number in an xattr block.  Looking at the
kernel version in the initial error:

> Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.9-1.667smp #1 SMP Tue Nov 2 14:59:52
> EST 2004 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Andreas and I found and fixed an xattr sharing bug in December 2004,
about five months ago.  It's a race when one process is deleting an
unshared xattr block while another process is simultaneously trying to
share it, and it seems to be particularly visible when you've got
SELinux on.  The fix is in the core mbcache.c code, but directly affects
ext3 xattrs.

This was fixed both upstream and in Fedora updates quite some time ago. 
"yum update" is your friend in this case. :-)

Cheers,
 Stephen





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