> Activity on one partition (hda1) causes kjournald to also write > to another partition (sda1). This in turn causes the harddrive > which contains sda1 to spinup or not spindown. I've activated > laptop-mode using laptop-mode-tools. hda1 and sda1 are both > formatted with ext3. On unaffected kernels (e.g. 2.6.27.5) btrace > produces no output. On affected kernels (e.g. 2.6.27.6, 2.6.27-rc7) > btrace produces output as below. I've looked at the changes between 2.6.27.5 and 2.6.27.6, and I don't see anything that might explain such a regression. Indeed, there's only one patch between .5 and .6 that even touches ext3, and the patch seems pretty innocent. Is /dev/sda1 even mounted? It doesn't included up in your /etc/mtab listing. The only thing I can suggest is to try 2.6.27.6 with the only patch that touches ext3 reverted (i.e., unapply it with patch -R). If the problem still shows up, I would suggest getting the linux-2.6.27.y tree from: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6.27.y.git And then doing a git bisection search to try to find the guilty commit. Regards, - Ted commit a0b8bfb34743b6e6c2bb06ad5a270590d90270f7 Author: Arthur Jones <ajones@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri Nov 7 00:05:17 2008 +0000 ext3: wait on all pending commits in ext3_sync_fs commit c87591b719737b4e91eb1a9fa8fd55a4ff1886d6 upstream In ext3_sync_fs, we only wait for a commit to finish if we started it, but there may be one already in progress which will not be synced. In the case of a data=ordered umount with pending long symlinks which are delayed due to a long list of other I/O on the backing block device, this causes the buffer associated with the long symlinks to not be moved to the inode dirty list in the second phase of fsync_super. Then, before they can be dirtied again, kjournald exits, seeing the UMOUNT flag and the dirty pages are never written to the backing block device, causing long symlink corruption and exposing new or previously freed block data to userspace. This can be reproduced with a script created by Eric Sandeen <sandeen@xxxxxxxxxx>: #!/bin/bash umount /mnt/test2 mount /dev/sdb4 /mnt/test2 rm -f /mnt/test2/* dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test2/bigfile bs=1M count=512 touch /mnt/test2/thisisveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryverylongfilename ln -s /mnt/test2/thisisveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryverylongfilename /mnt/test2/link umount /mnt/test2 mount /dev/sdb4 /mnt/test2 ls /mnt/test2/ umount /mnt/test2 To ensure all commits are synced, we flush all journal commits now when sync_fs'ing ext3. Signed-off-by: Arthur Jones <ajones@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> Cc: <linux-ext4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxx> diff --git a/fs/ext3/super.c b/fs/ext3/super.c index f38a5af..810bf7c 100644 --- a/fs/ext3/super.c +++ b/fs/ext3/super.c @@ -2365,13 +2365,12 @@ static void ext3_write_super (struct super_block * sb) static int ext3_sync_fs(struct super_block *sb, int wait) { - tid_t target; - sb->s_dirt = 0; - if (journal_start_commit(EXT3_SB(sb)->s_journal, &target)) { - if (wait) - log_wait_commit(EXT3_SB(sb)->s_journal, target); - } + if (wait) + ext3_force_commit(sb); + else + journal_start_commit(EXT3_SB(sb)->s_journal, NULL); + return 0; } -- 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