Another slip in the FC6 schedule
Jeff Vian
jvian10 at charter.net
Tue Oct 17 22:53:34 UTC 2006
On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 18:35 -0400, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 12:05:14AM +0200, Alfredo Ferrari wrote:
> > Seriously, I believe this is a big issue. Let me summarize:
> >
> > a) there was a kernel update for FC5
> > b) this kernel has a known bug which could results in corrupting
> > ext3 filesystems with 1k block size under heavy load
>
> it doesn't corrupt filesystems, it crashes instantly when the bug is hit.
>
> > c) ... nevertheless it has been pushed out with no special warning
> > d) pratically all /boot partitions are ext3 1k (anaconda generated)
> > e) many partitions on old machine upgraded from previous versions are
> > ext3 1k as well
>
> /boot partitions don't see anywhere near the sustained IO that is needed
> to hit this bug. it takes _hours_ of insane amounts of IO to hit it.
> It should be noted that I was the only person to ever see this.
> No bugzilla reports. No upstream reports. This is a real corner case
> scenario, as usually filesystems that see that kind of IO want the higher
> throughput that a larger blocksize brings.
>
Who in the world has a large amount of IO on /boot?
Since that is usually a separate filesystem and is usually only 100 Mb
in size, it is IME basically a static filesystem that only changes when
the kernel is updated.
I can easily see the reason that bug has not been encountered in the
past.
> > What was the rationale for releasing an official kernel update under such
> > dangerous conditions? Just "anaconda doesn't generate 1k partitions (not
> > true BTW)"? I still believe Linux is not (yet) Windows and if features are
> > in the system (like 1k blocksize partitions) people can use them if
> > they feel appropriate and they must work. Or perhaps there was a rush to
> > push this 2.6.18 kernel out to get some extra guinea pigs finding all
> > residual bugs? But this could be fair for the FC6 betas, not for FC5 where
> > people is expecting reasonable stability, anyway no life-threatening
> > issue like a (known) filesystem corruption bug.
>
> That code hasn't changed in months, so the 2.6.17 kernel in FC5 likely
> was already affected by the same bug, and yet despite this, no-one was
> hitting it because of the pathalogical circumstances needed to hit it.
>
> > Now how long do we have to wait before we have an update for FC5 fixing
> > this critical issue? Or do we have to manually rollback kernels on all
> > machines?
>
> I'm already working on the next update.
>
> Dave
>
> --
> http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
>
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