FC 8 & 9: instable file system

Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve rwgk at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 10 05:04:43 UTC 2008


It turns out the problem described below is connected to the kernel version.
Today, I ran "yum update" on the "other Fedora 8" machine mentioned below.
After rebooting with the new kernel (2.6.25.9-40.fc8) I'm seeing the application
failures due to intermittently missing files.
After rebooting with the old kernel (2.6.23.15-137.fc8) the machine is
completely stable again.
I'd say it is pretty clear there is a bug in the newer kernels.

For the records, the first kernel version I know is broken is 2.6.25.4-10.fc8.



----- Original Message ----
From: Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve <rwgk at yahoo.com>
To: fedora-list at redhat.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 9, 2008 11:01:38 AM
Subject: FC 8 & 9: instable file system

Randomly, files appear to be missing, leading to application failures. When immediately trying again
the exact same command it (usually) works.

We see this behavior on three systems:

  Fedora 8: 2.6.25.4-10.fc8 #1 SMP Thu May 22 22:58:37 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

  Fedora 8: 2.6.25.6-27.fc8 #1 SMP Fri Jun 13 16:17:54 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

  Fedora 9: 2.6.25.9-76.fc9.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jun 27 15:58:30 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

We have other Fedora 8 systems with older kernels that are completely stable, e.g.:

  2.6.23.15-137.fc8 #1 SMP Sun Feb 10 17:03:13 EST 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

We had intermittently missing files on both local disks (ext3) and over NFS, with mounts form various
hosts including a Netapp filer that's serving 30+ other machines without a problem.

My best way of demonstrating the problem is to repeatedly run SCons (which is a make replacement) on
a large source tree with several thousand files. This performs a full dependency analysis and should
just find that everything is already up-to-date. About 10% of the SCons runs fail with "missing" file
warnings, or spurious recompilation, presumably because header files are intermittently missing, which
changes the source signatures.

I already asked the SCons people, the hardware vendor, 3ware support, and I ran yum update a few times
in hopes that the problem goes way. So far it has been persistent.

Has anybody on this list seen similar problems?

Ralf




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