kern/131009: System freezes when attempting to copy from one mounted (USB-disk-resident) ext2 filesystem to another

Don Allen donaldcallen at gmail.com
Mon Jan 26 04:20:02 PST 2009


>Number:         131009
>Category:       kern
>Synopsis:       System freezes when attempting to copy from one mounted (USB-disk-resident) ext2 filesystem to another
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Mon Jan 26 12:20:01 UTC 2009
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Don Allen
>Release:        7.1
>Organization:
>Environment:
FreeBSD sophie.comcast.net 7.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE #0: Thu Jan  1 08:58:
24 UTC 2009     root at driscoll.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64

>Description:
I have just, within the last week, migrated to FreeBSD from Gentoo Linux. I do backups/archiving using three 300 Gb SATA drives in USB shoeboxes, with homebrew scripts (using rsync and tar) and Acronis Home (for Windows partitions). All the USB drives contain a single partition with an ext2 filesystem. One of my scripts simply rsyncs one mounted drive with another, resulting in a copy. For reasons irrelevant to this report, yesterday I had to reinitialize one of the drives and do a full copy of the most current backup/archive disk to the newly initialized one. I did the initialization with FreeBSD, using mke2fs. I immediately ran into the issue with the default inode size not being supported by the kernel and could not mount the newly initialized drive. After googling revealed that problem to me, I reinitialized using mke2fs -I 128, which allowed me to mount the new filesystem. But after starting the rsync from the current drive to this one, the system would completely freeze
  perhaps 1/2 an hour and after copying perhaps 18 or 20 Gbytes of a total 127. I believe, but am not certain, that the crash occurred while transferring a particularly large file, about 22 Gbytes (an Acronis backup file). Reviving the system required power-cycling. I then had to fsck the source drive and reinitialize the destination drive. I did this twice with FreeBSD and then tried it a third time, initializing the destination drive with a circa 2007 Gentoo installation CD. All three attempts resulted in the same complete system crash. I then tried initializing the destination drive with two partitions, one 60 Gbytes (for use by Acronis), the second covering the rest of the disk (for use by my own scripts). I initialized the large partition as a UFS filesystem and performed the full rsync once again to that large partition. That rync completed normally.

There appears to be a serious error in the ext2 support.  
>How-To-Repeat:
Rsync a large number of files, some files > 20 Gbytes, to a newly-initialized ext2 filesystem. 
>Fix:


>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted:


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