On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 02:44:48PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> I was able to reproduce the failure reliably by using a 5G tmpfs file
> for the VM's disk file, and bisected this down to:
>
> ext4: support simple conversion of extent-mapped inodes to use i_blocks
>
> In order to make it simpler to test the code which support
> i_blocks/indirect-mapped inodes, support the conversion of inodes
> which are less than 12 blocks and which are contained in no more than
> a single extent.
>
> The primary intended use of this code is to converting freshly created
> zero-length files and empty directories.
>
> Note that the version of chattr in e2fsprogs 1.42.7 and earlier has a
> check that prevents the clearing of the extent flag. A simple patch
> which allows "chattr -e <file>" to work will be checked into the
> e2fsprogs git repository.
>
> Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@xxxxxxx>
>
> I don't think this is actually causing the problem, but rather
> exposing a latent bug in fs/ext4/indirect.c. From some code
> inspection that I did investigating the resize2fs bug, it's pretty
> clear that indirect.c codepath has some bugs dealing with ENOSPC
> conditions when allocating indirect metadata blocks.
>
> Xfstests #269 runs fsstress in parallel with ENOSPC hitters, and one
> of the things fsstress does is to call the FS_IOC_SETFLAGS with random
> values, so with this commit, we are migrating some small files to use
> indirect block.. I suspect that when we then do some writes to these
> small files and they hit an ENOSPC condition, it causes the file
> system corruption.
>
> I patched ext4_ind_migrate() to log an ext4_warning and then return
> -ENOSPC, and confirmed that (a) with ext4_end_migrate() disabled, the
> fs corruption problem went away, and (b) fsstress is calling
> FS_IOC_SETFLAGS with completely random values, and thus causing us to
> migrate some of the extent-mapped files to indirect block mapped
> files.
>
> Given that extents->indirect migration isn't really that important, I
> propose we deal with this by dropping the above commit for now. It's
> clear we need to fix up fs/ext4/indirect.c, especially as more
> distro's consider using ext4 to support ext3 file systems. So after
> we fix the ENOSPC bugs I've noticed in ext4_alloc_branch(), we can try
> introducing the extent->indirect migration feature again for the next
> merge window.
>
> Zheng, thanks for calling this bug to our attention, and thanks for
> your extensive testing efforts!
Hi Ted,
Thanks for your explanation. I agree with you that we could drop this
patch temporarily and take it back after we fix the ENOSPC bug in
ext4_alloc_branch().
Regards,
- Zheng
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