Something strange seems to be going on with ReiserFS 3.6.6 on kernel
2.4.0-test1. I don't know if this is a bug in the kernel itself or in ReiserFS,
but it appears to be corrupting files when I unmount the filesystem using the
Alt+SysRq+U method.
Basically I had made a rescue disk with ReiserFS and the IDE drivers compiled as
modules. I booted this disk and mounted my main ReiserFS partition, edited some
files, rebuilt my ramdisk image on the partition, copied it back to the
diskette, and rebooted again (I did cleanly unmount the partition with the SysRq
method, or so I thought.)
When I repeated this procedure after booting, I found that the last file I had
edited on the ReiserFS partition was corrupted (it was ~250 bytes, but the last
100 bytes were wrongly filled with zeros.) In another instance, I had edited one
file, synced and unmounted the partition and rebooted only to find that the
original version of the file was still there! In all cases, this was only the
file data - no ReiserFS metadata seemed to be corrupted.
These problems have never happened with recent ReiserFS versions when I either
shut down the machine normally or cut power (in this case, the journaling works
flawlessly.) They only seem to happen when I'm doing testing work and use
Alt+SysRq+U to unmount ReiserFS prior to rebooting. I have a feeling that
buffers are never flushed correctly even though the page cache appears to be
vaild, but why just on ReiserFS? (It never happens on ext2 as far as I know.)
This could also be a Linux problem (i.e., with the page cache or buffer cache
flushing), but I don't know.
Has anyone else experienced this? I'll try to do Alt+SysRq unmounts on a scrap
partition over and over to confirm this if possible.
- Matt Yourst
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Matt T. Yourst Massachusetts Institute of Technology
yourst@mit.edu 617.225.7690
513 French House - 476 Memorial Drive - Cambridge, MA 02136
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