Hi, I'm presently rather puzzled, if this is really a kernel bug, its a big bug.
Summary: The system ramdisk (initrd) gets corrupted while running mkfs.ext2 on a local sata disk partition. Reproduced on kernel versions: vanilla 2.6.16 - 2.6.20 (<2.6.16 doesn't run on any of the systems I can do tests with). Please note: I could reproduce this on serveral systems, all of them use ECC memory and the memory of most of them the memory is monitored using EDAC. Details: 1.) Our systems boot from an initrd, all system services are running from the initrd/ramdisk. 2.) While setting up a lustre meta data storage server, lustre runs mkfs.ext2 -j -b 4096 -F -i 4096 -J size=400 -I 512 /dev/sda4 (Please note, I first observed this while using a lustre patched kernel, but I could reproduce this with vanilla kernels). While this mkfs.ext2 command was running, suddenly running commands such as ps, top, ls, etc. resulted in segmentation faults. To see whats going on, I copied the entire / (so the initrd) into a tmpfs root, chrooted into it, also bind mounted the main / into this chroot and compared several times /bin of chroot/bin and the bind-mounted /bin while the mkfs.ext2 command was running. beo-05:/# diff -r /bin /oldroot/bin/ beo-05:/# diff -r /bin /oldroot/bin/ beo-05:/# diff -r /bin /oldroot/bin/ Binary files /bin/sleep and /oldroot/bin/sleep differ beo-05:/# diff -r /bin /oldroot/bin/ Binary files /bin/bsd-csh and /oldroot/bin/bsd-csh differ Binary files /bin/cat and /oldroot/bin/cat differ ... Also tested different schedulers, at least happens with deadline and anticipatory. The corruption does NOT happen on running the mkfs command on /dev/sda1, but happens with sda2, sda3 and sda3. Also doesn't happen with extended partitions of sda1. Any idea whats going on? Thanks, Bernd -- Bernd Schubert Q-Leap Networks GmbH - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
