Mon, 31 Jul 2006
XFS Corruption
Odysseus has been hit by the infamous
XFS endianity bug
in the 2.6.17 kernel (for those who do not know, this in some rare cases
can create a filesystem corruption which xfs_repair still cannot
fix).
I have tried to fix the filesystem according to the guidelines in the FAQ, but there must be yet another problem in my XFS volume or in the kernel, as it keeps crashing when I try to actually use that volume. Since Friday I have been trying to put Odysseus back in shape, so far without success. Now I am copying the local (non-mirrored) data to a spare disk, and I will recreate the entire volume from scratch.
I feel sorry for the XFS developers, as they have always been helpful
when I had a problem with XFS. But I am afraid I will have to use something
different than XFS. I am considering JFS (which was the fastest filesystem
when I did my own testing), but I will probably use ext3: this is - from
my experience - a very stable filesystem, with one important feature:
a rock-solid e2fsck, which can even fix the filesystem corrupted
by a hardware bug (unlike reiserfsck, and unfortunately
xfs_repair as well).
I hope the FTP service of ftp.linux.cz will be restored tomorrow.