Hi Boyd
On 28/03/07, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Wednesday 28 March 2007, "Jeff Rollin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
about 'Re: SOLVED: Recover from LVM errors? (Was: Re: [gentoo-user] Help -
system reboots while compiling)':
> > > 1. Frankly, I'm not impressed with Linux in this case*. /var is not
> > > a "mission critical" filesystem in the sense that if it contains
> > > errors, it can still be mounted and the errors don't necessarily
> > > mean the system won't come up.
> >
> > [F]orcing a mount of a damaged filesystem is asking for trouble.
>
> It IS a bad idea, but it's not like I "forced" a mount; the system
> came up normally and functioned normally until it hit a damaged inode,
> whereupon it crashed with nary an indication of what had gone wrong.
Ah, yes, that's a problem. What filesystem are you using? I was fairly
sure ext2/3 tries to detect damage (even while r/w mounted) and force a
r/o re-mount or unmount. [Not that that couldn't cause a freeze or
reboot, but at least it's conservative.]
The filesystem I am currently using on that partition is Reiserfs3, as
you suspected judging from what you say later. However, I am also
currently in the process of migrating all my reiserfs filesystems to
XFS. I have heard that it is unstable on X86 but I have not had any
problems with it (touchwood) to date except insofar as it is only
possible to grow xfs volumes, not shrink them. openSUSE (or is it
Novell?) certainly seem to be less keen on Reiserfs than they used to
be, judging from reports from about the beginning of the year.
Reiserfs (and possibly others) is quite stupid, at least in this regard.
After the filesystem is mounted it performs basically zero sanity checks,
and always assumes the data provided by the block device is complete and
accurate. It can't handle a slowly failing HD, and will almost assuredly
silently corrupt data on such a device. This is one of the reasons some
people strongly recommend against reiserfs. I still use it, but my
important data is on RAID6 (underneath LVM), so I can be fairly certain
the data received by the filesystem is good.
Yes, for this and other reasons I am moving away from it as I said.
Hopefully this disk is not "slowly failing", but sometimes we get
powercuts here and I suspect the damage occured on one of those
occasions.
/me is looking for a new favorite file system.
I have had no complaints with ext3, but do you have any thoughts on XFS?
Jeff
--
Q: What will happen in the Aftermath?
A: Impossible to tell, since we're still in the Beforemath.
http://latedeveloper.org.uk
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