From: Jamie Lokier Subject: Re: Rampant ext3/4 corruption on 2.6.34-rc7 with VIVT ARM (Marvell 88f5182) Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 11:16:20 +0100 Message-ID: <20100511101620.GA18654@shareable.org> References: <1273569821.21352.19.camel@pasglop> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Nicolas Pitre , Saeed Bishara , "James E.J. Bottomley" , Andrew Morton , linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org To: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Return-path: Received: from mail2.shareable.org ([80.68.89.115]:46994 "EHLO mail2.shareable.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932253Ab0EKKQr (ORCPT ); Tue, 11 May 2010 06:16:47 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1273569821.21352.19.camel@pasglop> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > On the other hand, it could also be a busticated marvell SATA driver :-) I've seen similar ext3 corruption errors with an IDE on a Sigma Designs EM8620 with ARM core. It's completely unrelated :-) But the fault was in the IDE driver doing cache flushes too late after starting to set up DMA. To diagnose it, we luckily found a reproducible test case, then sprinkled full cache flushes at various places to narrow it down, and eventually found that one full cache flush in the driver itself sorted it out, which told us where the fault was. From there it was easy. -- Jamie