linux-ext4 - Re: fsck infinite loop on corrupt ext4 file system

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Date:	Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:03:01 -0600
From:	Andreas Dilger <adilger@....com>
To:	Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>
Cc:	Frank Mayhar <fmayhar@...gle.com>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: fsck infinite loop on corrupt ext4 file system

On Aug 18, 2009  13:03 -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Something we *could* do to further reduce the chances would be to
> compare the primary and backup group descriptors, either at
> mount-time, or in e2fsck.  This would add an extra level of paranoia,
> although the people who are trying to do 5 second boots with HDD's
> would probably complain about the extra seeks that we'd be introducing
> as a result.

I've thought about this recently as well.  Since the GDT blocks are
allocated contiguously (at least until we get META_BG filesystems) it
would only be a single extra seek and read at mount time.  For a 16TB
filesystem there are 8MB of GDT blocks, so that isn't a huge amount of
extra IO as log as we do it with a single read instead of many seeks.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.

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