On 27 Oct 2012, Theodore Ts'o said:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 01:45:25PM +0100, Nix wrote:
>> Ah! it's turned on by journal_async_commit. OK, that alone argues
>> against use of journal_async_commit, tested or not, and I'd not have
>> turned it on if I'd noticed that.
>>
>> (So, the combinations I'll be trying for effect on this bug are:
>>
>> journal_async_commit (as now)
>> journal_checksum
>> none
>
> Can you also check and see whether the presence or absence of
> "nobarrier" makes a difference?
Done. (Also checked the effect of your patches posted earlier this week:
no effect, I'm afraid, certainly not under the fails-even-on-3.6.1 test
I was carrying out, umount -l'ing /var as the very last thing I did
before /sbin/reboot -f.)
nobarrier makes a difference that I, at least, did not expect:
[no options] No corruption
nobarrier No corruption
journal_checksum Corruption
Corrupted transaction, journal aborted
nobarrier,journal_checksum Corruption
Corrupted transaction, journal aborted
journal_async_commit Corruption
Corrupted transaction, journal aborted
nobarrier,journal_async_commit Corruption
No corrupted transaction or aborted journal
I didn't expect the last case at all, and it adequately explains why you
are mostly seeing corrupted journal messages in your tests but I was
not. It also explains why when I saw this for the first time I was able
to mount the resulting corrupted filesystem read-write and corrupt it
further before I noticed that anything was wrong.
It is also clear that journal_checksum and all that relies on it is
worse than useless right now, as Eric reported while I was testing this.
It should probably be marked CONFIG_BROKEN in future 3.[346].* stable
kernels, if CONFIG_BROKEN existed anymore, which it doesn't.
It's a shame journal_async_commit depends on a broken feature: it might
be notionally unsafe but on some of my systems (without nobarrier or
flashy caching controllers) it was associated with a noticeable speedup
of metadata-heavy workloads -- though that was way back in 2009...
however, "safety first" definitely applies in this case.
--
NULL && (void)
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