linux-ext4 - Re: inode 7 frequently have problem when I run fsck

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Message-ID: <20180806073841.m2424siybuewgcv5@localhost.localdomain>
Date:   Mon, 6 Aug 2018 09:38:41 +0200
From:   Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com>
To:     "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>
Cc:     Patrick Dung <mpatdung@...il.com>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: inode 7 frequently have problem when I run fsck

On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 11:25:32AM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 12:44:46PM +0800, Patrick Dung wrote:
> > The problem usually appeared when I did not use the hard drive for a while.
> > It happened a few times in the past.
> > 
> > When I perform fsck today, it does not appear.
> > I had checked the SATA hard drive with smartmontools. It passed the
> > long test and I did not found any problem.
> > 
> > After searching the web. I found Cisco WebEX Node SPA have very
> > similar error message that I had encountered.
> > https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/interfaces_modules/shared_port_adapters/install_upgrade/ASR1000/asr_sip_spa_hw/ASRtrbl.pdf
> > Please check page 7-8 or search for "Inode 7" in the document.
> 
> I've looked at the Cisco documentation, and what you've cited appears
> to be an example of how to fix a corrupted file system.  It appears to
> me to be merely an example, not an acknowledgement this kind of
> corruption regularly happens on the Cisco WebEx device (if it were,
> customers would probably refuse to buy it, since it means a system
> administrator would be regularly needing to do this kind of manual
> intervention on what is *supposed* to be an appliance sort of device.)

I agree, the cisco documentation does not say it's something that would
be expected to happen. on the other hand, it's the only fsck example and
it's weirdly specific for something that I do not think is happening
very often (I have never seen this issue before).

Regardless, it does look like a hardware issue.

Any chance you can find any storage/file system related errors in your
system logs ?

If you see this issue again, can you please report e2fsck output again
so that we can see whether those are the same blocks ?

Could you also capture and send the metadata image next time it happens
? Before you let e2fsck fix it.

e2image -Q /dev/hda1 hda1.qcow2
bzip2 -z hda1.qcow2

Feel free to attach it to the Fedora bz.

Thanks!
-Lukas

> 
> In any case, I can't really tell you much more.  We do a lot of
> extensive regression testing, and this is not a corruption I've seen
> before.  A lot of people use ext4, and you are the first person who
> has reported this particular problem.
> 
> This is why I suspected that it might be a hardware problem.  It's
> possible it is a kernel bug, and it could be anything, from an ext4
> bug, to a device driver bug, to an LVM or MD or bcache bug if you are
> using any of those components.  You didn't report the kernel version
> to me, and you didn't tell me if this is a distro kernel.  If it is a
> distro kernel, I'd suggest reporting it to the distribution, since
> they might be able to tell you if anyone else with that distro kernel
> has reported a problem similar to yours.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 						- Ted