[SOLVED] WARNING!: Ext4 data corruption kernel bug on the prowl.

GazL · 10-24-2012, 02:21 PM

Stable kernels not so stable (again): Film at 11.

http://lwn.net/Articles/521022/

Quote:

In short: ext4 users would be well advised to avoid versions 3.4.14, 3.4.15, 3.5.7, 3.6.2, and 3.6.3; they all contain a patch which can, in some situations, cause filesystem corruption.

From the posts I've read it doesn't sound like the kernel devs are 100% certain what is going on just yet. No mention of whether Ben Hutchings' 3.2.y branch is affected but probably best to be careful out there until more comes to light.

Best keep a close eye on the news sites such as lwn for a while.

jtsn · 10-24-2012, 04:19 PM

Ext2 filesystem corruption was my main reason for switching mission-critical servers to BSD back in 2000 (and back to Slackware as ext3 settled in). So this is not the first time, but the continuation of a long sad story.

T3slider · 10-24-2012, 04:23 PM

And for once in my life I've kept up with the 3.4 branch diligently. FML.

astrogeek · 10-24-2012, 04:28 PM

I've installed my Slackware 14 with ext3 for ability to mount NFS on some older boxen...

Once more, lagging behind has an unexpected advantage! But it is getting crowded back here!

D1ver · 10-24-2012, 04:58 PM

Sounds like it was a good time to experiment with XFS..

GazL · 10-24-2012, 05:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by D1ver

Sounds like it was a good time to experiment with XFS..

How's that working out for you?

Beelzebud · 10-24-2012, 05:16 PM

More confirmation that I made the right choice by making Slackware my distro. As if I needed any more.

D1ver · 10-24-2012, 05:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GazL

How's that working out for you?

[OT]
Seems great so far. I watched this presentation on recent improvements in XFS and decided to try it out. I'm using it on a 128 gig SSD laptop, which is probably not the best use case for XFS.

I've got a 2tb RAID 1 home media server running Slack 14 with ext4 at the moment, I'm considering reformatting that over to XFS, as lots of big files are supposed to be the XFS's strong suit.

[/OT]

Gerard Lally · 10-24-2012, 07:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jtsn

Ext2 filesystem corruption was my main reason for switching mission-critical servers to BSD back in 2000 (and back to Slackware as ext3 settled in). So this is not the first time, but the continuation of a long sad story.

I was reading Greg Kroah-Hartmann's dismissive comments about NetBSD the other day. This puts his rather smug and condescending attitude in perspective, doesn't it?

But it's just a major Linux filesystem. Nothing important.

damgar · 10-24-2012, 08:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by D1ver

Sounds like it was a good time to experiment with XFS..

Yeah and here I was and decided to finall play with ext4 again on my new raid0 setup on a system that has a 1 TB partition and and 10GB files, when I had just got comfortable with XFS after using ext3 sine 13.1. At least I got the bugs worked out to where I can just format and reinstall after a quick copy over....

Edit: Oh wait, I had only built a 3.6.2 kernel to expriment with and I have ALREADY formatted and reinstalled using the original 3.2.x kernel that came stock with 14.0! Now I just have to create an XFS partition going forward and I'm good! Good call Pat!

TobiSGD · 10-24-2012, 08:28 PM

Every software has bugs and some of them are critical. File-system drivers are software, so sooner or later any of them can be the victim of a critical bug. Has this error actually occurred to anyone? Where your backups also affected?

jtsn · 10-24-2012, 09:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gezley

I was reading Greg Kroah-Hartmann's dismissive comments about NetBSD the other day. This puts his rather smug and condescending attitude in perspective, doesn't it?

The BSDs have a different development model with a -stable and a -current branch. For a reason.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD

Every software has bugs and some of them are critical. File-system drivers are software, so sooner or later any of them can be the victim of a critical bug.

But if you have a sane release engineering (which our beloved kernel has not), such critical bugs don't hit your end-users.

ReaperX7 · 10-24-2012, 11:02 PM

Another Red Hat goon named Greg Kroah-Hartmann posted something else negative towards BSD eh? Not surprising. He must be a friend of Lennart.

sombragris · 10-24-2012, 11:22 PM

From the 14.0 ChangeLog:

Quote:

Code:

Fri Aug 24 20:08:37 UTC 2012
This is Slackware 14.0 release candidate 3, and is hopefully the last stop
on our long road to a stable Slackware release soon. After hearing that
the 3.4.x kernel series will have long term support, I tested 3.4.9 hoping
that it would prove stable enough to use that as the release kernel, but
there are problems with an oops in kernel/time/clocksource.c every few boots.
Given that the 3.2.x series has been very stable, it seems prudent to stick
with that for release, and 3.2.28 is going to be the release kernel. So,
one more round of testing. Let me know if there are any problems. Thanks!

Thank you Pat!! You rock!

damgar · 10-25-2012, 12:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ReaperX7

Another Red Hat goon named Greg Kroah-Hartmann posted something else negative towards BSD eh? Not surprising. He must be a friend of Lennart.

From Wikipedia:

Quote:

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel developer. He is the current Linux kernel maintainer for the -stable branch with Chris Wright,[2] the staging subsystem,[2] USB,[2] driver core, debugfs, kref, kobject, and the sysfs kernel subsystems,[2] Userspace I/O (with Hans J. Koch)[2] and TTY layer.[2] He is also the maintainer of the linux-hotplug and created the udev projects. Additionally, he helps to maintain the Gentoo Linux packages for these programs, and helps with the kernel package. He worked for Novell in the SUSE Labs division and, as of 1 February 2012, works at the Linux Foundation.[1] He is currently[when?] working full time on the Linux Driver Project.[3]
He is a co-author of Linux Device Drivers (3rd Edition)[4] and author of Linux Kernel in a Nutshell,[5] and used to be a contributing editor for Linux Journal. He also contributes articles to LWN.net, the news computing site.
Kroah-Hartman frequently helps in the documentation of the kernel and driver development through talks[6][7] and tutorials.[8][9] In 2006, he released a CD image of material to introduce a programmer to working on Linux device driver development.[10]