From: Theodore Tso Subject: Re: Crash in 2.6.28.7 - ext4 related Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:52:45 -0500 Message-ID: <20090226205245.GM7227@mit.edu> References: <20090226141946.GE7227@mit.edu> <20090226160829.GH7227@mit.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org To: Fabio Comolli Return-path: Received: from thunk.org ([69.25.196.29]:33569 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752421AbZBZUwu (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:52:50 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 09:42:15PM +0100, Fabio Comolli wrote: > It's my home directory and so I prefer not to share, sorry. No problem, I understand. > Anyway, it seems that after the removal of that (possibly corrupted) > directory, I can't reproduce the problem anymore. I tried to create > / modify / delete some big directories, even two or three at a time > with no luck. Did you ever try running e2fsck on the filesystem while you could reproduce it? Did it report any errors? A good thing to do in general, if you can report these sorts of problems, is to run e2fsck with the -n option, while the filesystme is unmounted, and see if any errors are reported. That would tell us if there were any filesystem corruption problems (and the -n avoids making any changes to the filesystem). Also, even if you don't feel willing to share the e2image file, if you can reproduce it, please consider making a raw e2image dump. That way if the problem goes away again, maybe you'll be able to consistently report reproduce it on the e2image dump file. The other thing that you can do which will sometimes work is to add the -s option to the e2image command. The -s option scrambles the name of the directory entries and zeros out any unused portions of directory blocks to prevent privacy problems. The downside is that it can prevent certain bugs from being repeatable and you have to either turn off the dir_index feature or run e2fsck to fix up the htree since the filename hashes will be screwed up after the directory entries are scrambled. So it's not ideal, but in cases where there are privacy issues, that can be helpful. Regards, - Ted