From: Alistair John Strachan <alistair@devzero.co.uk>
Reply-To: alistair@devzero.co.uk
To: Steve Lord <lord@xfs.org>
Subject: Re: Copying huge amount of data on ReiserFS, XFS and Silicon Image 3112 cause oops.
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 16:01:33 +0100
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On Tuesday 14 September 2004 15:12, you wrote:
[snip]
>
> You would need to be within the size of the physical memory of your
> box to having a full filesystem - as a very rough approximation. So 1Gbyte
> memory, 1 Gbyte disk free. There is a path when XFS is attempting to
> free up pre-reserved disk space to make room for a new write, it
> does this by flushing data out to disk. This means it has to work
> out where it is physically going to go, which usually results in it
> taking less metadata space to reference the data than the worst case
> estimate it previously made. For lots of cases this probably still
> does not overflow the stack, but if you add in drivers like lvm
> and md and a complex scsi driver it probably pushes you over the
> limit.
>

Well, this is a good reference answer to the question. The machines are all 
small systems with only 1GB memory, and plenty of remaining space on the two 
partitions. I doubt I'd trigger the logic causing the problem.

> In general though, I would rebuild without the 4K stacks and at least
> have the kernel ready for a convenient reboot.

Thanks, I'll do that.

-- 
Cheers,
Alistair.

personal:   alistair()devzero!co!uk
university: s0348365()sms!ed!ac!uk
student:    CS/AI Undergraduate
contact:    1F2 55 South Clerk Street,
            Edinburgh. EH8 9PP.
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