Re: [patch] linux likes to kill bad inodes

Jan Kara (jack@suse.cz)
Thu, 26 Apr 2001 11:33:18 +0200


>
>
> On Wednesday, April 25, 2001 10:01:20 PM +0200 Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi!
> >
> >> > Hi!
> >> >
> >> > I had a temporary disk failure (played with acpi too much). What
> >> > happened was that disk was not able to do anything for five minutes
> >> > or so. When disk recovered, linux happily overwrote all inodes it
> >> > could not read while disk was down with zeros -> massive disk
> >> > corruption.
> >> >
> >> > Solution is not to write bad inodes back to disk.
> >> >
> >>
> >> Wouldn't we rather make it so bad inodes don't get marked dirty at all?
> >
> > I guess this is cheaper: we can mark inode dirty at 1000 points, but
> > you only write it at one point.
>
> Whoops, I worded that poorly. To me, it seems like a bug to dirty a bad
> inode. If this patch works, it is because somewhere, somebody did
> something with a bad inode, and thought the operation worked (otherwise,
> why dirty it?).
>
> So yes, even if we dirty them in a 1000 different places, we need to find
> the one place that believes it can do something worthwhile to a bad inode.
Yes checking those places where bad inode gets dirty is probably good
idea. But I'd add test to write_inode anyway together with warning that
this shouldn't happen.

Honza

--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SuSE Labs
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