[Linux-cluster] cannot fsck on our 16 TB gfs2 volume...

[Bob Peterson]

On Mon, 2008-03-03 at 11:22 +0100, PeP wrote:
> hydra11 openais # fsck.gfs2 -v /dev/ftpdata/ftp
> Initializing fsck
> Initializing lists...
> Initializing special inodes...
> Validating Resource Group index.
> Level 1 RG check.
>   (level 1 passed)
> 8001 resource groups found.
> Setting block ranges...
> This system doesn't have enough memory + swap space to fsck this file 
> system.
> Additional memory needed is approximately: 6000MB
> Please increase your swap space by that amount and run gfs_fsck again.

Hi PeP,

gfs2_fsck only gives this message if it tries to allocate memory
(i.e. malloc) for an in-core bitmap and the malloc fails.
Are you sure that swap is turned on?

On several occasions I've tried to figure out ways to reduce the
memory requirements of gfs_fsck and gfs2_fsck, but I haven't found
a way yet.  Perhaps the problem is that it's just trying to allocate 
too big of memory chunks for bitmaps because of your 2G RG size.
You could try specifying -r 1024 on mkfs.gfs2 and see if that helps.

Regards,

Bob Peterson
Red Hat GFS