Subject: Re: [vserver] Possible Hashify Corruption
From: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2010 02:53:21 +0200

On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 03:25:04PM +0100, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On 17/10/2010 14:54, Michael S. Zick wrote:
> >On Sat October 16 2010, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> >>Hi,

> >>Can anybody hazard a guess as to what happened here? I'm prepared to
> >>consider any theory at the moment, no matter how far fetched.

> >>I'm running 2.6.30.10-vs2.3.0.36.14-pre8. The file system is ext4
> >>without journal and in data=writeback mode.

> >Lets go with your first guess, file corruption, and speculate a bit...

> >We know that ext4 gets its speed by the high degree of meta-data and
> >data catching that it uses.
> >We know that if ext4 is not cleanly shut down, your file system is
> >burnt toast.
> >On any type of system.

> That is, in my experience, superstition. I have a number of laptops with 
> SSDs where I don't want the write overheads of journalling with the 
> exact same setup, and none have ever had any file corruption issues. 
> Sure, sometimes after yanking the battery the files that the open for 
> writing get broken and fsck puts their fragments in lost+found, but 
> that's no worse than ext2 has been before it.

putting superstition aside, can you recreate the issue?
i.e. is there a script or procedure which reliably
produces the 'corruption'?

> >Now, can we relate those behaviors to a single file system name space?

> >Or, first, was it limited to a single file system name space?

> Yes - there is only one partition, only one file system (the root one).

it is not a good idea to put Linux-VServer guests on
the same filesystem as the host (system). having at
least one partition (shared between all the guests)
is strongly advised.

> >Was the guest you where running and changing file content on the __only__
> >one that may have had changed files?

> Both guests are toast in exactly the same way. The host's binaries are 
> fine and the host boots OK. The guests were running fine for days, with 
> many guest reboots in the meantime. Things appear to have gone wrong 
> when the host was shut down. That _might_ imply that things were running 
> fine from the caches pre-filled some time before, but it seems really 
> strange that ALL binaries would be hosed, even the ones that were never 
> touched. The only thing that would have touched them all that I can 
> think of is hashify.

what do those 'corrupted' binaries contain?

> >That one is a slim chance, the host context is writing to /var/log/* if
> >nothing else - any of those get corrupted?

> My /var/log is on tmpfs in both the host and the guests (I'm on a SSD 
> and don't need the logs so I don't want them wasting my write cycles).

> >Where there other running guests on the system, with changed /
> >changing files that did not get corrupted?

> There are only two guests on the system, and they were both running.

> >Did you shut down just this one guest or the entire machine?

> First the guests individually, then the host machine. Clean shutdowns.

> >Are you using tagging on this file system?

> Tagging? What do you mean?

tagging as in 'tag' as mount option (which is
intentionally really hard to set on a single root
partition :)

best,
Herbert

> >Sorry for only having questions rather than answers.

> Questions are good, too. Right now I'm out of ideas so anything that 
> comes up with possibilities is good.


> Gordan