Storm formation [LWN.net]

Storm formation

Posted Oct 28, 2012 15:49 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Storm formation by tialaramex
Parent article: An update on the ext4 corruption issue

Well, the fix under review <http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1210.3/026...> did indeed find a bug that does not depend on but is merely highlighted by journal checksumming, a place where the inode bitmap was being modified outside any transaction (and was thus not being journalled).

Of course, whether a journal abort and *more* filesystem corruption is actually the right way to indicate a bug of this nature is another matter :)

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Storm formation

Posted Oct 28, 2012 16:17 UTC (Sun) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

I looked up the commit mentioned in that patch (119c0d4) using git tag --contains, and if that commit was the cause then the bug was introduced in the 3.4 merge window.

If that is the case, it is impressive that the bug remained hidden for so long. Either the ones saying it was very hard to hit were right, or it did not cause any real problems beyond breaking the journal checksum (which then cascaded into the full corruption).