Re: Ext4: deadlock occurs when running fsstress and ENOSPC errors are seen.

[Amit Sahrawat]

Sorry Ted, if it caused the confusion.

There were actually 2 parts to the problem, the logs in the first mail
were from the original situation â where in there were many block
groups and error prints also showed that.

EXT4-fs error (device sda1): ext4_mb_generate_buddy:742: group 1493, 0
clusters in bitmap, 58339 in gd
EXT4-fs error (device sda1): ext4_mb_generate_buddy:742: group 1000, 0
clusters in bitmap, 3 in gd
EXT4-fs error (device sda1): ext4_mb_generate_buddy:742: group 1425, 0
clusters in bitmap, 1 in gd
JBD2: Spotted dirty metadata buffer (dev = sda1, blocknr = 0). There's
a risk of filesystem corruption in case of system crash.
JBD2: Spotted dirty metadata buffer (dev = sda1, blocknr = 0). There's
a risk of filesystem corruption in case of system crash.

1)	Original case â when the disk got corrupted and we only had the
logs and the hung task messages. But not the HDD on which issue was
observed.
2)	In order to reproduce the problem as was coming through the logs
(which highlighted the problem in the bitmap corruption). To minimize
the environment and make a proper case, we created a smaller partition
size and with only 2 groups. And intentionally corrupted the group 1
(our intention was just to replicate the error scenario).
3)	After corruption we used âfsstressâ  - we got the similar problem
as was coming the original logs. â We shared our analysis after this
point for looping in the writepages part the free blocks mismatch.
4)	We came across âDarrickâ patches(in which it also mentioned about
how to corrupt to reproduce the problem) and applied on our
environment. It solved the initial problem about the looping in
writepages, but now we got hangs at other places.

Using âtune2fsâ is not a viable solution in our case, we can only
provide the solution via. the kernel changes. So, we made the changes
as shared earlier.

So the question isn't how the file system got corrupted, but that
you'd prefer that the system recovers without hanging after this
corruption.
>> Yes,  our priority is to keep the system running.

Again, Sorry for the confusion. But the intention was just to show the
original problem and what we did in order to replicate the problem.

Thanks & Regards,
Amit Sahrawat


On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 10:37 AM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 10:30:10AM +0530, Amit Sahrawat wrote:
>> 4)    Corrupt the block group â1â  by writing all â1â, we had one file
>> with all 1âs, so using âddâ â
>> dd if=i_file of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4096 seek=17 count=1
>> After this mount the partition â create few random size files and then
>> ran âfsstress,
>
> Um, sigh.  You didn't say that you were deliberately corrupting the
> file system.  That wasn't in the subject line, or anywhere else in the
> original message.
>
> So the question isn't how the file system got corrupted, but that
> you'd prefer that the system recovers without hanging after this
> corruption.
>
> I wish you had *said* that.  It would have saved me a lot of time,
> since I was trying to figure out how the system had gotten so
> corrupted (not realizing you had deliberately corrupted the file
> system).
>
> So I think if you run "tune2fs -e remount-ro /dev/sdb1" before you
> started the fsstress, the file system would have remounted the
> filesystem read-only at the first EXT4-fs error message.  This would
> avoid the hang that you saw, since the file system would hopefully
> "failed fast", before th euser had the opportunity to put data into
> the page cache that would be lost when the system discovered there was
> no place to put the data.
>
> Regards,
>
>                                                 - Ted
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