Date:	Fri, 04 Jul 2014 16:38:50 +0400
From:	Dmitry Monakhov <dmonakhov@...nvz.org>
To:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>, David Jander <david@...tonic.nl>
Cc:	Matteo Croce <technoboy85@...il.com>,
	"Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@...cle.com>,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: ext4: journal has aborted

On Fri, 4 Jul 2014 08:20:22 -0400, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 04, 2014 at 01:28:02PM +0200, David Jander wrote:
> > 
> > Here is the output I am getting... AFAICS no problems on the raw device. Is
> > this sufficient testing, Ted?
> 
> I'm not sure what theory Dmitry was trying to pursue when he requested
> that you run the fio test.  Dmitry?
Because at this moment we have some complex storage+fs interaction,
My idea was to simply isolate raw dev case and run integrity test on that storage.
fio/libaio is trivial and easy way to do it(except it does not issued
flush cmd).  Unfortunetly according to David test finished w/o any
error. So my theory about broken strorage driver was not confirmed.

> 
> 
> Please note that at this point there may be multiple causes with
> similar symptoms that are showing up.  So just because one person
> reports one set of data points, such as someone claiming they've seen
> this without a power drop to the storage device, that therefore all of
> the problems were caused by flaky I/O to the device.
> 
> Right now, there are multiple theories floating around --- and it may
> be that more than one of them are true (i.e., there may be multiple
> bugs here).  Some of the possibilities, which again, may not be
> mutually exclusive:
> 
> 1) Some kind of eMMC driver bug, which is possibly causing the CACHE
> FLUSH command not to be sent.
> 
> 2) Some kind of hardware problem involving flash translation layers
> not having durable transactions of their flash metadata across power
> failures.
> 
> 3) Some kind of ext4/jbd2 bug, recently introduced, where we are
> modifying some ext4 metadata (either the block allocation bitmap or
> block group summary statistics) outside of a valid transaction handle.
> 
> 4) Some other kind of hard-to-reproduce race or wild pointer which is
> sometimes corrupting fs data structures.
> 
> 
> If someone has a easy to reproduce failure case, the first step is to
> do a very rough bisection test.  Does the easy-to-reproduce failure go
> away if you use 3.14?  3.12?  Also, if you can describe in great
> detail your hardware and software configuration, and under what
> circumstances the problem reproduces, and when it doesn't, that would
> also be critical.  Whether you are just doing reset or a power cycle
> if an unclean shutdown is involved, might also be important.
> 
> And at this point, because I'm getting very suspicious that there may
> be more than one root cause, we should try to keep the debugging of
> one person's reproduction, such as David's, separate from another's,
> such as Matteo's.  It may be that there ultimately have the same root
> cause, and so if one person is able to get an interesting reproduction
> result, it would be great for the other person to try running the same
> experiment on their hardware/software configuration.  But what we must
> not do is assume that one person's experiment is automatically
> applicable to other circumstances.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 						- Ted
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