On Mar 24, 2008 22:34 +0530, Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote: > If the block allocator gets blocks out of system zone ext3 calls > ext3_error. But if the file system is mounted with errors=continue > return with -EIO. > > System zone is the block range mapping block bitmap, inode bitmap and inode > table. I don't understand this patch. Surely it has nothing to do with the user, and instead the code should re-try the allocation after marking the block in-use in the bitmap? > Signed-off-by: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Signed-off-by: Mingming Cao <cmm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > --- > fs/ext3/balloc.c | 2 +- > 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) > > diff --git a/fs/ext3/balloc.c b/fs/ext3/balloc.c > index da0cb2c..6ce7f7d 100644 > --- a/fs/ext3/balloc.c > +++ b/fs/ext3/balloc.c > @@ -1642,7 +1642,7 @@ allocated: > "Allocating block in system zone - " > "blocks from "E3FSBLK", length %lu", > ret_block, num); > - goto out; > + goto io_error; > } I think the problem here is that this "goto" is simply an in-effective method of error handling. The block HAS to be marked in-use in the bitmap, or it will just continue to try and be allocated. After marking the block in-use there should be a "goto retry-alloc" instead of error. To be honest, I thought in 2.6 this would invoke the block bitmap checking code to revalidate the whole bitmap at this point and then retry the alloc. In 2.4 this similar code looks like: if (tmp == le32_to_cpu(gdp->bg_block_bitmap) || tmp == le32_to_cpu(gdp->bg_inode_bitmap) || in_range (tmp, le32_to_cpu(gdp->bg_inode_table), EXT3_SB(sb)->s_itb_per_group)) { ext3_error(sb, __FUNCTION__, "Allocating block in system zone - block = %u", tmp); /* Note: This will potentially use up one of the handle's * buffer credits. Normally we have way too many credits, * so that is OK. In _very_ rare cases it might not be OK. * We will trigger an assertion if we run out of credits, * and we will have to do a full fsck of the filesystem - * better than randomly corrupting filesystem metadata. */ ext3_set_bit(j, bh->b_data); goto repeat; } Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html