Re: New thread RDSL, post-2.6.20 kernels and amanda (tar) miss-fires

From: Ray Lee
Date: Wed Mar 14 2007 - 17:49:48 EST


On 3/13/07, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tuesday 13 March 2007, Gene Heskett wrote:
>On Tuesday 13 March 2007, Gene Heskett wrote:
>>Greetings;
>>Someone suggested a fresh thread for this.
>>
>>I now have my scripts more or less under control, and I can report that
>>kernel-2.6.20.1 with no other patches does not exhibit the undesirable
>>behaviour where tar thinks its all new, even when told to do a level 2
>> on a directory tree that hasn't been touched in months to update
>> anything.
>>
>>Next up, 2.6.20.2, plain and with the latest RDSL-0.30 patch.
>
>And amanda/tar worked normally for 2.6.20.2 plain.
>
>Next up, 2.6.21-rc1 if it will build here.

It built, it booted, and its busted big time. First, with an amdump
running in the background, the machine is so close to unusable that I
considered rebooting, but I needed the data to show the problem. I am
losing the keyboard and mouse for a minute or more at a time but the
keystrokes seem to be being registered so it eventually catches up.

Disk i/o seems to be the killer according to gkrellm.

But to give one an idea of the fits this is giving tar, I'll snip a line
or 2 from an amstatus report here:
coyote:/GenesAmandaHelper-0.6 1 planner: [dumps way too big, 138200 KB,
must skip incremental dumps]

Huh? 138.2GB? A 'du -h .' in that dir says 766megs.

coyote:/root 1 4426m wait for dumping
du -h says 5.0GB so that's ballpark, but its also a level 1, so maybe 20
megs is actually new since 15:57 this afternoon local. kmails final
maildir is in that dir.

This goes on for much of the amstatus report, very few of the reported
sizes are close to sane.

Now, can someone suggest a patch I can revert that might fix this? The
total number of patches between 2.6.20 and 2.6.21-rc1 will have me
building kernels to bisect this till the middle of June at this rate.

In a previous email, you said you were using ext3. If that's the case,
there doesn't appear to be much going on in terms of patches between
2.6.20 and 2.6.21-rc1. The only one that even comes close to looking
like it might have an effect would only come in to play if you have a
filesystem that has ACL information, but is mounted by a kernel that
doesn't have ACL support.

I have to echo wli here, I'm afraid, and recommend at least a *few*
bisections to help narrow down the list of suspect patches.

There are tutorials out there for git users. I use the mercurial
repository, as I find the mercurial interface and workflow a lot more
intuitive, but it has the same capability.

Even 2-5 bisections will greatly help others hunt the bug down.

Ray
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