From: Arthur Jones Subject: ext3: slow symlink corruption on umount... Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:37:34 -0700 Message-ID: <20081024183733.GA25797@ajones-laptop.nbttech.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org Return-path: Received: from smtp2.riverbed.com ([206.169.144.7]:42840 "EHLO smtp2.riverbed.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750832AbYJXSrJ (ORCPT ); Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:47:09 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Hi All, I'm seeing slow symlink corruption on ext3 on linux-2.6.27, yesterday's linux-2.6 git tree and 2.6.9 RHEL4.7. I.e. every kernel I've tried I see this effect. To reproduce this, I need: * 250MB + tar file in memory (tmpfs or in the buffer cache) * long symlinks in the tar file (over 60 characters) * umount immediately after untarring What I see is that the symlinks are corrupted, e.g.: # ls -l etc/vmware-vix-disklib etc/vmware-vix-disklib -> ??f fsck shows: Symlink /etc/vmware-vix-disklib (inode #16454) is invalid. Debugfs shows: debugfs: stat <16454> Inode: 16454 Type: symlink Mode: 0777 Flags: 0x0 Generation: 1431972005 User: 0 Group: 0 Size: 65 File ACL: 0 Directory ACL: 0 Links: 1 Blockcount: 8 Fragment: Address: 0 Number: 0 Size: 0 ctime: 0x4900ac69 -- Thu Oct 23 09:55:05 2008 atime: 0x4900ac84 -- Thu Oct 23 09:55:32 2008 mtime: 0x4900ac69 -- Thu Oct 23 09:55:05 2008 BLOCKS: (0):56034 TOTAL: 1 I'm still tracking down exactly what's going on. Anyone seen anything like this before? ext2 does not show this effect (I've not tried ext4). It happens when the backing block device is a SATA drive or flash. Thanks, Arthur