Another slip in the FC6 schedule

Dave Jones davej at redhat.com
Tue Oct 17 22:35:39 UTC 2006


On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 12:05:14AM +0200, Alfredo Ferrari wrote:
 > Seriously, I believe this is a big issue. Let me summarize:
 > 
 > a) there was a kernel update for FC5
 > b) this kernel has a known bug which could results in corrupting
 >     ext3 filesystems with 1k block size under heavy load

it doesn't corrupt filesystems, it crashes instantly when the bug is hit.

 > c) ... nevertheless it has been pushed out with no special warning
 > d) pratically all /boot partitions are ext3 1k (anaconda generated)
 > e) many partitions on old machine upgraded from previous versions are
 >     ext3 1k as well

/boot partitions don't see anywhere near the sustained IO that is needed
to hit this bug.  it takes _hours_ of insane amounts of IO to hit it.
It should be noted that I was the only person to ever see this.
No bugzilla reports. No upstream reports.  This is a real corner case
scenario, as usually filesystems that see that kind of IO want the higher
throughput that a larger blocksize brings.

 > What was the rationale for releasing an official kernel update under such
 > dangerous conditions? Just "anaconda doesn't generate 1k partitions (not 
 > true BTW)"? I still believe Linux is not (yet) Windows and if features are
 > in the system (like 1k blocksize partitions) people can use them if 
 > they feel appropriate and they must work. Or perhaps there was a rush to 
 > push this 2.6.18 kernel out to get some extra guinea pigs finding all 
 > residual bugs? But this could be fair for the FC6 betas, not for FC5 where 
 > people is expecting reasonable stability, anyway no life-threatening
 > issue like a (known) filesystem corruption bug.

That code hasn't changed in months, so the 2.6.17 kernel in FC5 likely 
was already affected by the same bug, and yet despite this, no-one was
hitting it because of the pathalogical circumstances needed to hit it.

 > Now how long do we have to wait before we have an update for FC5 fixing
 > this critical issue? Or do we have to manually rollback kernels on all 
 > machines?

I'm already working on the next update.

	Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk




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