[Linux-cluster] gfs_fsck fails on large filesystem

[Robert Peterson]

Stephen Willey wrote:
> Is there any way we can determine the progress during all passes?  At
> the moment all we're seeing is lines like the following:
>
> (pass1.c:213)  Setting 557096777 to data block
>
> Is this representative of simply the numbers of blocks in the
> filesystem?  If so, how do we get the numbers of blocks in the
> filesystem while the fsck is running?
>
> We use this FS for backups and we're currently determining whether we'd
> be better off just wiping it and re-syncing all our data (which would
> take a couple of days, not several) so unless we can get a reliable
> indication of how long this will take, we probably won't finish it.
Hi Stephen,

The latest gfs_fsck will report the percent complete for passes 1 and 5,
which take the longest.   It sounds like you're running it in verbose mode
(i.e. with -v) which is going to do a lot of unnecessary I/O to stdout and
will slow it down considerably.  If you're redirecting stdout, you can
do a 'grep "percent complete" /your/stdout | tail' or something similar to
figure out how far along it is with that pass.

Only passes 1 and 5 go block-by-block and therefore it's easy to figure
out how far they've gotten.  For the other passes, it would be difficult to
estimate their progress, and probably not worth the overhead in terms
of time the computer would have to spend figuring it out.

You can get it to go faster by restarting it without the -v, but then it 
will
have to re-do all the work it's already done to this point.

Based on what you've told me, it probably will take longer to fsck than
you're willing to wait. 

Regards,

Bob Peterson
Red Hat Cluster Suite