Re: File system problems

[Bruno Haible]

Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > when I run 'sync' it hangs. I can interrupt the 'sync' command via
> > Ctrl-C and restart it, but it then still hangs. I ended up rebooted
> > anyway, and after reboot an 'fsck' was required. This 'fsck' found
> > between 17000 and 170000 empty directories (depending on how much time
> > I had let 'sync' run). The data (built files under testdir-all) was
> > good, though.
> 
> disk writeback is a beast, yes. If tests are creating lots of data on
> the disk that's stressing the VM and possibly it even gets to OOM, which
> is a hard thing to recover from.

But the effects - tens of thousands of directories to fix at the next 'fsck' -
make it look like something is *very* wrong.

Would it help to find out which part of the build process triggers this,
or is no one looking into this seriously?

Bruno