Problem with ext3 filesystem

[Theodore Tso]

On Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 08:53:45PM +0000, Jan wrote:
> the problem is only on the 1.6 tb areca sata raid. and there it is
> reproducible.

Interesting.  I'm using multiple 600+ megabyte (0.6tb) filesystems
SATA Raid server on my home fileserver using ext3, and I'm not seeing
any problems.  (I have 3tb of space, but for management reasons I
elected to divvy up the space into smaller volumes.)

I'm using a 2.6.18-rc2 kernel with the Areca ARC-1160 controller, with
Areca firmware version 1.41.  (I haven't upgraded to 1.43 yet, even
though it just became available a few month or two.)  It's been
working just fine, and I've had any issues with it.  What Areca
firmware version are you running with?

> > 
> >> there are problems with the disks or the cable the controller should
> >> notice this ? Perhaps I should ask at areca ?
> > 
> > your 2nd post[0] indeed looked a lot like hardware errors. So yes, if
> > these errors persist/are reproducible, you're probably better off asking
> > the maintainer or the sata folks for known issues...
> 
> o.k. but the problems seems to come only with areca and ext3, not with
> jfs. strange ...

When you say it's reproducible, has it been reproducible after using
mke2fs to reformat the filesystem, perhaps with a manually specified
filesystem size?  E2fsck should have complained if the filesystem size
was larger than the apparent size of the physical volume, but if the
Areca firmware somehow screwed up and reported a larger size that what
was actually there, then both mke2fs and e2fsck will blindly believe
what the BLKGETSIZE64 ioctl returns (they won't use the binary search
method of determining the disk size unless the GETBLKSIZE/GETBLKSIZE64
ioctls fail for one reason or another), and if there was some
wraparound bug, that would explain what you're seeing.

So the only other thing I can suggest is to double check the
filesystem size as reported by dumpe2fs or df, and compare it with the
raw volume size as reported by the Areca management interface; do the
numbers look sane?

					= Ted