impossible to create a ext3 filesystem on a LVM2 Logical Volume

Stephen C. Tweedie sct at redhat.com
Wed Mar 31 12:51:35 UTC 2004


Hi,

On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 10:56, Paul Libert wrote:

> I'm faced with the above mentionned problem.

Well, I know for a fact it's not impossible: I've got a box here running
Fedora Core 2 test release, and it's using lvm2 for all of its
filesystems except for /boot.  I wonder what's different about your
setup?

> I've created a new LV and when I try to create the FS on it, it fails 
> when saying "Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information:"
> sar output shows that CPU is in 100% wio.

If it's in wio, chances are the fs is waiting for an lvm2 IO to
complete.  That could be stuck in the device-mapper layer, or in the
underlying device driver.  We'd need to see a stack trace of the stuck
process to investigate.  (alt-sysrq-t should give you that.)

> I've performed a strace of the 'mkfs.ext3' and last system call is a 
> call to fsync (see hereafter as small part of the trace file)

Yep, that's consistent with the device being stuck.

In any case, if "mkfs" is hanging it's not an ext3 fault, because the
filesystem isn't running by that stage.

Cheers,
 Stephen






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