Re: another hard disk broken or xfs problems?

From: Rogier Wolff
Date: Thu Feb 26 2004 - 05:04:33 EST


On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 09:25:51AM +0100, Nico Schottelius wrote:
> I am really wondering about the error message, as "internal errors"
> indicate for me an error in the kernel.

[...]

> And btw, do all filesystem drivers behave in this way, printing internal
> errors and displaying call traces when they find errors in the
> filesystem?

For a filesystem driver, things are clear: it's the only one writing
to the data on the drive. So when things go wrong: in principle, it's
an internal error.

It would be nice if you'd always be able to salvage your data by
just mounting the partition, but that's not the case. A specialized
program like ...-repair or fsck will do a better job.

Now for a logging filesystem, the assumption that it messed up itself
is even stronger than for a classical filesystem. It should be able
to handle whatever happens.

It's very difficult to check all assumptions about what's on the disk
at every step and still have a reasonable performance. That's why some
errors may only be noticed a bit late and lead to slightly misleading
error messages.

Roger.

--
** R.E.Wolff@xxxxxxxxxxxx ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2600998 **
*-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --*
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