On 24 Oct 2012, Theodore Ts'o spake thusly: > Toralf, Nix, if you could try applying this patch (at the end of this > message), and let me know how and when the WARN_ON triggers, and if it > does, please send the empty_bug_workaround plus the WARN_ON(1) report. > I know about the case where a file system is mounted and then > immediately unmounted, but we don't think that's the problematic case. > If you see any other cases where WARN_ON is triggering, it would be > really good to know.... Confirmed, it triggers. Traceback below. But first, a rather lengthy apology: I did indeed forget something unusual about my system. In my defence, this is a change I made to my shutdown scripts many years ago, when umount -l was first introduced (early 2000s? something like that). So it's not surprising I forgot about it until I needed to add sleeps to it to capture the tracebacks below. It is really ugly. You may need a sick bag. In brief: some of my filesystems will sometimes be uncleanly unmounted and experience journal replay even on clean shutdowns, and which it is will vary unpredictably. Some of my machines have fairly intricate webs of NFS-mounted and non-NFS-mounted filesystems, and I expect them all to reboot successfully if commanded remotely, because sometimes I'm hundreds of miles away when I do it and can hardly hit the reset button. Unfortunately, if I have a mount structure like this: /usr local /usr/foo NFS-mounted (may be loopback-NFS-mounted) /usr/foo/bar local and /usr/foo is down, any attempt to umount /usr/foo/bar will hang indefinitely. Worse yet, if I umount the nfs filesystem, the local fs isn't going to be reachable either -- but umounting nfs filesystems has to happen first so I can killall everything (which would include e.g. rpc.statd and rpc.nfsd) in order to free up the local filesystems for umount. The only way I could see to fix this is to umount -l everything rather than umounting it (sure, I could do some sort of NFS-versus-non-NFS analysis and only do this to some filesystems, but testing this complexity for the -- for me -- rare case of system shutdown was too annoying to consider). I consider a hang on shutdown much worse than an occasional unclean umount, because all my filesystems are journalled so journal recovery will make everything quite happy. So I do sync umount -a -l -t nfs & sleep 2 killall5 -15 killall5 -9 exportfs -ua quotaoff -a swapoff -a LANG=C sort -r -k 2 /proc/mounts | \ (DIRS="" while read DEV DIR TYPE REST; do case "$DIR" in /|/proc|/dev|/proc/*|/sys) continue;; # Ignoring virtual file systems needed later esac case $TYPE in proc|procfs|sysfs|usbfs|usbdevfs|devpts) continue;; # Ignoring non-tmpfs virtual file systems esac DIRS="$DIRS $DIR" done umount -l -r -d $DIRS) # rely on mount's toposort sleep 2 The net effect of this being to cleanly umount everything whose mount points are reachable and which unmounts cleanly in less than a couple of seconds, and to leave the rest mounted and let journal recovery handle them. This is clearly really horrible -- I'd far prefer to say 'sleep until filesystems have finished doing I/O' or better have mount just not return from mount(8) unless that is true. But this isn't available, and even it was some fses would still be left to journal recovery, so I kludged it -- and then forgot about doing anything to improve the situation for many years. So, the net effect of this is that normally I get no journal recovery on anything at all -- but sometimes, if umounting takes longer than a few seconds, I reboot with not everything unmounted, and journal recovery kicks in on reboot. My post-test fscks this time suggest that only when journal recovery kicks in after rebooting out of 2.6.3 do I see corruption. So this is indeed an unclean shutdown journal-replay situation: it just happens that I routinely have one or two fses uncleanly unmounted when all the rest are cleanly unmounted. This perhaps explains the scattershot nature of the corruption I see, and why most of my ext4 filesystems get off scot-free. I'll wait for a minute until you're finished projectile-vomiting. (And if you have suggestions for making the case of nested local/rewmote filesystems work without rebooting while umounts may still be in progress, or even better suggestions to allow me to umount mounts that happen to be mounted below NFS-mounted mounts with dead or nonresponsive NFS server, I'd be glad to hear them! Distros appear to take the opposite tack, and prefer to simply lock up forever waiting for a nonresponsive NFS server in this situation. I could never accept that.) [...] OK. That umount of local filesystems sprayed your added empty bug workaround and WARN_ONs so many times that nearly all of them scrolled off the screen -- and because syslogd was dead by now and this is where my netconsole logs go, they're lost. I suspect every single umounted filesystem sprayed one of these (and this happened long before any reboot-before-we're-done). But I did the old trick of camera-capturing the last one (which was probably /boot, which has never got corrupted because I hardly ever write anything to it at all). I hope it's more useful than nothing. (I can rearrange things to umount /var last, and try again, if you think that a specific warning from an fs known to get corrupted is especially likely to be valuable.) So I see, for one umount at least (and the chunk of the previous one that scrolled offscreen is consistent with this): jbd2_mark_journal_empty bug workaround (21218, 21219) [obscured by light] at fs/jbd2/journal.c:1364 jbd2_mark_journal_empty+06c/0xbd ... [addresses omitted for sanity: traceback only] warn_slowpath_common+0x83/0x9b warn_slowpath_null+0x1a/0x1c jbd2_mark_journal_empty+06c/0xbd jbd2_journal_destroy+0x183/0x20c ? abort_exclusive_wait+0x8e/0x8e ext4_put_super+0x6c/0x316 ? evict_inodes+0xe6/0xf1 generic_shutdown_super+0x59/0xd1 ? free_vfsmnt+0x18/0x3c kill_block_super+0x27/0x6a deactivate_locked_super+0x26/0x57 deactivate_super+0x3f/0x43 mntput_no_expire+0x134/0x13c sys_umount+0x308/0x33a system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b -- 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