ZFS file corruption problem

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2012, Mark Murawski wrote:
>
> Why would the whole pool now become available upon access to a bad file?

A disk drive (or HBA) may be hanging (e.g. endless retries) when the 
bad file is accessed.  This is a common problem with consumer disks or 
HBAs which believe they are the top level authority when it comes to 
data integrity.  Zfs itself does not include any timers to decide to 
stop waiting.  Zfs depends on the lower-level OS & drivers to decide 
to stop waiting on a stalled device.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/