From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Nov 24 17:25:52 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5616C16A4CE; Wed, 24 Nov 2004 17:25:52 +0000 (GMT) Received: from pooker.samsco.org (pooker.samsco.org [168.103.85.57]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E2D5643D48; Wed, 24 Nov 2004 17:25:51 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from scottl@freebsd.org) Received: from [192.168.254.11] (junior-wifi.samsco.home [192.168.254.11]) (authenticated bits=0) by pooker.samsco.org (8.12.11/8.12.10) with ESMTP id iAOHSiS2064285; Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:28:45 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from scottl@freebsd.org) Message-ID: <41A4C43D.8020304@freebsd.org> Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:26:21 -0700 From: Scott Long User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040929 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Dan Nelson References: <41A4944C.6030808@freebsd.org> <20041124171855.GE95873@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <20041124171855.GE95873@dan.emsphone.com> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.86.1.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=3.8 tests=none autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on pooker.samsco.org cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 5-STABLE softupdates issue? X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 17:25:52 -0000 Dan Nelson wrote: > In the last episode (Nov 24), Scott Long said: > >>Matthias Andree wrote: >> >>>out of fun and to investigate claims about alleged bgfsck resource >>>hogging (which I could not reproduce) posted to >>>news:de.comp.os.unix.bsd, I pressed the reset button on a live >>>FreeBSD 5-STABLE system. >>> >>>Upon reboot, fsck -p complained about an unexpected softupdates >>>inconsistency on the / file system and put me into single user >>>mode, the manual fsck / then asked me to agree to increasing a link >>>count from 21 to 22 (and later to fix the summary, which I consider >>>a non-issue). A subsequent fsck -p / ended with no abnormality >>>detected. >> >>No, this in theory should not happen. YOu could have caught it right >>at the instance that it was sending a transaction out to disk, or you >>could have caught an edge case that isn't understood yet. >>Unfortunately, ATA drives also cannot be trusted to flush their >>caches when one would expect, so this leaves open a lot of possible >>causes for your problem. > > > If you just want to test stability in the face of system crashes (and > not power failure), you can drop to DDB and run "reboot" to simulate a > panic (or run reboot -qn as root). That way your drive doesn't lose > power. > > That said, I get unexpected softupdates inconsistencies pretty > regularly on kernel panics. I just let the system run until I can > reboot and run a fsck -p. > I wonder if this points to dependencies not being pushed out of the buffer/cache correctly. That said, I rarely, if ever, see softupdate problems on my SCSI development systems, but that might just be coincidence. Scott