5.2-BETA: giving up on 4 buffers (ata)

Kevin Oberman oberman at es.net
Wed Nov 26 10:51:40 PST 2003


> Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 19:37:45 +0100
> From: Matthias Andree <matthias.andree at gmx.de>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> 
> Hi,
> 
> when I rebooted my 5.2-BETA (kernel about 24 hours old), it gave up on
> flushing 4 dirty blocks.
> 
> I had three UFS1 softdep file systems mounted on one ATA drive, one ext2
> file system on another ATA drive and one ext2 file system on a SCSI
> drive.  Both ext2 file systems had been mounted read-only, so they can't
> have had dirty blocks.
> 
> At the next reboot, FreeBSD checked all three UFS file systems as they
> hadn't been umounted cleanly before. Makes me wonder if FreeBSD gave up
> on the super blocks...

This looks like a GEOM related issue, although I am not completely sure
of this.

I have observed the following:
System dies leaving the file systems dirty. (File systems have
soft-updates enabled.)
I reboot to single user and fsck all partitions including the root.
I halt or reboot.
I get a number of dirty buffers and the syncer eventually gives up.

If I issue a "mount -u /" before shutting down, the problem does not
occur. Why I should be able to get dirty buffers on a file system that
has never been mounted as RW, I don't understand, but I see it every
time I reboot after a crash.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634


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