On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 12:00:15AM +0930, Kevin Shanahan wrote: > > debugfs: stat <759> > > hermes:~# debugfs /dev/dm-0 > debugfs 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008) > debugfs: stat <759> > > Inode: 759 Type: regular Mode: 0660 Flags: 0x80000 > Generation: 3979120103 Version: 0x00000000:00000001 > User: 0 Group: 10140 Size: 14615630848 > File ACL: 0 Directory ACL: 0 > Links: 1 Blockcount: 28546168 > Fragment: Address: 0 Number: 0 Size: 0 > ctime: 0x4a0acdb5:2a88cbec -- Wed May 13 23:10:05 2009 > atime: 0x4a0ac45b:10899618 -- Wed May 13 22:30:11 2009 > mtime: 0x4a0acdb5:2a88cbec -- Wed May 13 23:10:05 2009 > crtime: 0x4a0ac45b:10899618 -- Wed May 13 22:30:11 2009 > Inode Pathname > 759 /local/dumps/exchange/exchange-2000-UCWB-KVM-18.bkfB-KVM-18.bkf Do you know how the system was likely writing into /local/dumps/exhcnag/eexchange-2000-UCWB-KVM-18.bkf? What this a backup via rsync or tar? Was this some application writing into a pre-existing file via NFS, or via local disk access? Given the ctime/atime fields, I'm inclined to guess the latter, but it would be good to know. The stat dump for the inode 759 does *not* show logical block 1741329 getting mapped to physical block 529. So the question is how did that happen? I've started looking, and one thing popped up at me. I need to check in with the Lustre folks who originally donated the code, but I don't see any spinlock or mutexes protecting the inode's extent cache. So if you are on an SMP machine, this could potentially have caused the problem. How many CPU's or cores do you have? What does /proc/cpuinfo report? Also, would it be correct to assume this file is getting served up via Samba. My theory is that we might be running into problems when two threads are simultaneously trying read and write to a single file at the same time. Hmm, what is accessing your files on this system? Are you just doing backups? Is it just a backup server? Or are you serving up files using Samba and there are clients which are accessing those files? So if this the problem the following experiment should be able to confirm whether it's the problem, by seeing if the problem goes away if we short-circuit the inode's extent cache. In fs/ext4/extents.c, try inserting a "return" statement to in ext4_ext_put_in_cache(): static void ext4_ext_put_in_cache(struct inode *inode, ext4_lblk_t block, __u32 len, ext4_fsblk_t start, int type) { struct ext4_ext_cache *cex; return; <---- insert this line BUG_ON(len == 0); cex = &EXT4_I(inode)->i_cached_extent; cex->ec_type = type; cex->ec_block = block; cex->ec_len = len; cex->ec_start = start; } This should short circuit the i_cached_extent cache, and this may be enough to make your problem go away. (If this theory is correct, using mount -o nodelalloc probably won't make a difference, although it might change the timing enough to make the bug harder to see.) If that solves the problem, the right long-term fix will be to drop bin a spinlock to protect i_cached_extent. - Ted -- 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