linux-kernel - Re: spurious -ENOSPC on XFS

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Message-ID: <20090112151133.GA24852@infradead.org>
Date:	Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:11:33 -0500
From:	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>
To:	Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@...hat.com>
Cc:	xfs@....sgi.com, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: spurious -ENOSPC on XFS

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 06:14:36AM -0500, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I discovered a bug in XFS in delayed allocation.
> 
> When you take a small partition (52MB in my case) and copy many small 
> files on it (source code) that barely fits there, you get -ENOSPC. Then 
> sync the partition, some free space pops up, click "retry" in MC an the 
> copy continues. They you get again -ENOSPC, you must sync, click "retry" 
> and go on. And so on few times until the source code finally fits on the 
> XFS partition.
> 
> This misbehavior is apparently caused by delayed allocation, delayed 
> allocation does not exactly know how much space will be occupied by data, 
> so it makes some upper bound guess. Because free space count is only a 
> guess, not the actual data being consumed, XFS should not return -ENOSPC 
> on behalf of it. When the free space overflows, XFS should sync itself, 
> retry allocation and only return -ENOSPC if it fails the second time, 
> after the sync.

This looks a lot like: http://oss.sgi.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=724
It's on my short-term todo list to turn the testcase in that entry
into a proper xfsqa testcase and followup on the investigation by
Dave and Eric.
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