Weird DISKS behaviour on 4.8-STABLE

[ODHIAMBO Washington]

Hello people,

I have been experiencing a weird problem with 4.8-STABLE for a long time.
I was ignoring it, thinking that it was a problem with the SCSI disks or
perhaps the contoller. I changed the disks from the original Intel box
to a Compaq box and I still noticed the problem was there.

What happened is that all of a sudden, the disk would 'fill' up with
nothing! Yes, that's true. I would try to track down whatever it is
but end up with nothing. So I decide to reboot. What would then
happen is that during the reboot, the behaviour would be that akin
to that which you always see when the system was abnormally shutdown -
salvage of blocks, etc. Then as sure as day follows night, the space
is back to normal.

At some point I retired two disks, replacing them with two new ones.
Now on the same Compaq box, I am still experiencing the same symptoms.
For starters, `mount` does not report the correct disk sizes:

da0 is 17GB
da1 is 36GB


but `df -h` gives following output

Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a    16G   4.5G  10.0G    31%    /
/dev/da1s1e    34G    17G    13G    56%    /wananchi


The output of `mount` is:

wash at ns2 ('tty') ~ 129 -> mount
/dev/da0s1a on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/da1s1e on /wananchi (ufs, local, soft-updates)


I am beginning to think that disk space is being freed, but the blocks
are not being reallocated/reassigned, leading to the misbehaviour. I
don't know what the correct terminology would be ;)

I am not an expert with disks though, so I would appreciate any
insight into what the cause of such a problem could be.



-Wash

-- 
Odhiambo Washington   <wash at wananchi.com>  "The box said 'Requires
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