From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Nov 24 22:16:35 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 C518816A4CE; Wed, 24 Nov 2004 22:16:35 +0000 (GMT) Received: from pooker.samsco.org (pooker.samsco.org [168.103.85.57]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4E96043D1F; Wed, 24 Nov 2004 22:16:35 +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 iAOMJRFO065487; Wed, 24 Nov 2004 15:19:27 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from scottl@freebsd.org) Message-ID: <41A5085F.9060600@freebsd.org> Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 15:17:03 -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: Michael Nottebrock References: <41A4944C.6030808@freebsd.org> <20041124171855.GE95873@dan.emsphone.com> <41A4C43D.8020304@freebsd.org> <41A506D3.6070908@gmx.net> In-Reply-To: <41A506D3.6070908@gmx.net> 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-stable@freebsd.org cc: Dan Nelson cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org cc: Matthias Andree 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 22:16:35 -0000 Michael Nottebrock wrote: > Matthias Andree wrote: > > >> I posted about softupdate problems on a SCSI system with DISABLED WRITE >> CACHE, on a somewhat flakey Micropolis drive that froze and caused >> massive ffs+softupdates corruption in February 2004 (on FreeBSD 4 >> though), see >> for the archived post, including logs. > > > FWIW, I'm used to "UNEXPECTED SOFTUPDATE INCONSISTENCY" erros as well, > been getting them every now and then after the occasional system lockup > or kernel panic as long as I've been running freebsd and I'm pretty sure > with each release since 4.0-R, too. I didn't know those are _literally_ > unexpected. If so, then softupdates is a probably lot more flaky than it > ought to be. > It's common (and even expected) for fsck to clean up normal things like unlinked files after a hard shutdown when softupdates is enabled. However, if fsck is bailing out and telling you that there is an unexpected inconsistency that needs to be fixed manually, that is not normal. Unfortunately, most of the evidence is probably long gone by then, so tracking it down is pretty tricky. I've had talks with some filesystem guys at a well-known Unix company who have talked of evil things like extracting dirty buffers from a crashdump file; that may be the level of effort needed to track down these kinds of problems. Scott