Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!news.umbc.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!world!ksr!jfw From: jfw@ksr.com (John F. Woods) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Subject: Re: Mixing 4k and 8k filesystems Message-ID: <35346@ksr.com> Date: 16 Nov 93 15:04:41 EST References: <2c7nn4$3g5@cleese.apana.org.au> Sender: news@ksr.com Lines: 30 newton@cleese.apana.org.au (Mark Newton) writes: >I put a second disk onto cleese a bit over a week ago. Since that time, my >uptime hasn't gone about three days. >Most of the crashes have resulted in filesystem damage -- Screes of >"bad block xxxxxxx" messages rush past on the console, followed by an >automatic reboot which fails due to unexpected inconsistencies found >by fsck. >Two of the crashes have left kernel dumps; Here's the most recent syslog >message from savecore: >Nov 15 19:47:50 cleese savecore: reboot after panic: ialloc: dup alloc >Nov 15 19:47:54 cleese savecore: Saving 16773120 bytes of image in ram.0 >I've only had these problems since I upgraded my second disk (previously, >8 days wasn't an unusual uptime; I shut the system down cleanly more often >than it crashed). The disk is a brand-new Connor CP30254, so I really doubt >that it's at fault. >Has anyone else had bad experiences with mixed 4k and 8k filesystems? I run NetBSD-current. I have 8K filesystems on most partitions, but a 4K filesystem on /usr/spool/news (which is on the same disk as another 8K partition, /usr/src). All the partitions get regular exercise; I've never seen any kind of random filesystem curdling except when running the machine with the motherboard external cache enabled. It is said that some motherboards have faulty cache logic that doesn't do DMA watchdogging right, and sure enough, disabling my external cache is correlated with seeing no filesystem curdling. (It's also much less of a performance hit than I would have expected.) You might try this if your problems recur, but I haven't seen anyone say that mixing 4K and 8K filesystems doesn't work.