On the weekend I reported to hackers about problems experienced with 2.2-stable and RELENG-3 systems where I experienced files that disappeared from cache and Mail directories that disappeared. The RELENG-3 system had files affected with softupdates enabled. The 2.2-stable system had sub-directories missing from the same directories that I was writing to via nfsv2.
By coincidence, I had cvsup'd and compiled new kernels and naturally made the assumption that there was causality there. Subsequently I have come to believe that the problem may have more to do with what I was doing, not changes to the code. For about 3-4 hours prior to noticing the problems, I had been repetitively editing dot files, then writing a kludge of dot files to the local system hard drive and to the nfs exported FS of the other computer, while occasionally checking mail on that computer. All files and directories missing were being updated for one reason or another by myself or by mail processes while I was doing this. It is speculation, but there is a good chance that there is a bug in the cache-handling code that causes problems with other files or directories being dropped from cache because of bad processing common to BOTH or ALL releases, when large numbers of dot files are being written. The dot files themselves did not disappear - other items to be written disappeared before their writes actually occurred. I know that this is a frustrating kind of message to receive, but I am not a developer & not qualified to go into the code myself. Also no logs or hard output are available - files/directories simply disappeared without any error messages. I just did a scan of the entire /usr/src/sys tree for \"\\.\" and \'\\.\' to see what code sections might be affected - mostly cache-handling. In quantity, not bad, really. Others have apparently reported missing files to do with nfs I believe. THis might or might not be a related problem. I guess that I am asking someone who is qualified, and concerned about missing files or directories, if they would be willing to do what I cannot - check the code for bad interactions when dot files are being written- bearing in mind that it is OTHER files/directories that are disappearing from cache before being written. Is anyone out there sufficiently intrigued by the possibility to invest some valuable time? I am a QA tester, not a developer, and therefore much more comfortable with discussion of symptoms and speculative causality than most developers I have known. I hope that someone thinks enough of the possibility to invest some time, which I know is in very short supply. I cannot deny that this is (informed) speculation - there are no guarantees. Regards and best wishes, Tom To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
