>> Hmmm.. >> Can you try mounting with >> -o barrier=0 >> >> just to see if my theory is at all correct? >> >> Thanks, >> NeilBrown >> > Progress report: I made the barrier change shortly after sending my last message (about 40 hours ago). With that in place, I was able to finish emptying one of the non-assimilated drives onto the array, after which I added that drive as a hot spare and started the process to grow the array onto it - the same procedure I've been applying since I created the RAID the other week. No problems so far, and the reshape is at 46%. It's hard to be positive that the barrier deactivation is responsible yet though - while the last few lockups have only been 1-16 hours apart, I believe the first two had at least 2 or 3 days between them. I'll keep the array busy to enhance the chances of a lockup though - each one so far has been during a reshape or a large batch of writing to the array's partition. If I make it another couple days (meaning time for this reshape to complete, another drive to be emptied onto the array, and another reshape at least started) I'll be pretty confident the problem has been identified. Assuming the barrier is the culprit (and I'm pretty sure you're right) what are the consequences of just leaving it off? I gather the idea of the barrier is to prevent journal corruption in the event of a power failure or other sudden shutdown, which seems pretty important, but it also doesn't seem like it was enabled by default in ext3/4 until 2008, which makes it seem less critical. Even if the ultimate solution for me is to just leave it disabled I'm happy to keep trying patches if you want to get it properly fixed in md. We may have to come up with an alternate way to work the array hard enough to trigger the lockups though - my last 1.5TB drive is what's being merged in now. After that completes I only have one more pair of 750GBs (that will have to be shoehorned in using RAID0 again). I do have a single 750GB left over, so I'll probably find a mate for it and get it added to. After that we're maxed out on hardware for a while. Mike -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
