[Linux-cluster] Found unlinked inode

[Borgström Jonas]

Hi again,

After stress testing a gfs filesystem for 24 hours fsck.gfs complains about "Found unlinked inode".
This scared me so I reran the test again but got the same result. 

My test consists of two nodes running bonnie++, postgresql and pgbench against a single file system. Every five
minutes one of the nodes is shot.

The weird part is that on both occasions the thing fsck.gfs complained about was an "unlinked inode" corresponding to a postgresql pid file. This is a file created (and deleted) every time postgresql is failed over to another node. It is also the last file on the filesystem being deleted when postgresql was shutdown before the filesystem was umounted and fsck.gfs was run.

Can anybody explain why this pid file triggered this fsck error twice and not any of the thousands of files created and deleted by bonnie++?

Does this mean the filesystem is corrupt, or is this an expected behavior for files deleted directly before a filesystem is umounted?

BTW: I'm not able to reproduce this by simply mounting the filesystem, starting/stopping pgsql and umounting. I need to leave the test running over night. I've also performed some tests directly on the SAN device and as far as I can tell it's working as expected.

OS: RHEL5 Advanced platform

[root at test-db1 ~]# fsck.gfs /dev/testdb/pg_fs 
Initializing fsck
Clearing journals (this may take a while).
Journals cleared.
Starting pass1
Pass1 complete      
Starting pass1b
Pass1b complete      
Starting pass1c
Pass1c complete      
Starting pass2
Pass2 complete      
Starting pass3
Pass3 complete      
Starting pass4
Found unlinked inode at 2375183   <-- This is a postgresql pid file
Add unlinked inode to l+f? (y/n)y
l+f directory at 11411
Added inode #2375183 to l+f dir
Pass4 complete      
Starting pass5
Converting 1 unused metadata blocks to free data blocks...
Converting 277 unused metadata blocks to free data blocks...
...
...

Regards,
Jonas