FYI: Reiserfs 3.5 problem
Yeah, yeah, I know 3.5 is really old. In the odd chance that I'm not the only
one still running a 3.5 FS (and hasn't chanced upon the instructions to
upgrade it to 3.6), I thought I might share this with y'all, since this
problem can lead to DOS (by hanging/crashing the system).
Files in ReiserFS 3.5 are supposed to be limited to 2GB. However, using 2.6.12
and 2.6.15, the system is perfectly happy to let me write far more than 2GB
to a file. That isn't much of a problem. The real problem arises when the
computer silently reboots or hangs as a results of this 'uncaught' error.
Before each crash/hang, I did notice that the byte-length of the file 'seemed'
accurate (it seemed to properly increase until it neared 4GB). I also noticed
that the block-length of the file lagged far behind.
Shouldn't the driver prevent a user from writing a file bigger than the FS can
handle? Since the driver detects 3.5 vs. 3.6, I would expect it to do so.
Alas, poor Yorick, it didn't.
The 3.6 format does not exhibit this fault.
A simple test: 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/reiser3.5/zero-test bs=100M count=50'
Neal
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