Crash with XFS file system -> random empty files
I'm running debian unstable with the latest 2.6.15 kernel with my root on
the XFS filesystem and had a system crash last night (working on debugging
S3 suspend with ehci-hcd). When I tried to load it this morning it had
problems with modprobe (and, come to find out, other critical binaries).
This crash has made my system unuseable, since now random files are empty
- they have size and attributes recorded, but they are void of content.
This happens to be a "feature" and "expected behavior" - the quick version
is that XFS "doesn't journal data, only meta-data". The problem is that
some of the files that were randomly nullified are modprobe, bash, and
other key files - presumably they had file reads open at the time of the
crash, but certainly no modification was going on.
Two questions:
1) Is there any possible way to recover from this situation other than a
backup of dpkg.status and reinstall (/home is on another partition).
2) Why is XFS so braindead in this regard? I have had this happen to me on
other occassions as well, althought it has never had this effect - usually
it is only a file in an editor that was open which gets cleared. In any
case, running xfs_check on the volume shows many other inconsistencies -
if it's only journalling meta-data why doesn't/can't it restore to an
atomic state? The past few times I've had this crash have made me leery,
the severity of it this time makes me more than ready to ban XFS
completely.
Thanks for any and all comments,
Joel Johnson
Reply to: