The following sympthom occured in a variant of the Knoppix-like linux appliance.
I get a corrupted miniroot ramdisk filesystem under kernel version 2.6.19.1 under intense memory usage during early startup of the system. In the course of a lengthy investigation of this behavior, I found out that the memory pages containing the miniroot ramdisk are freed during the initial installation process due to a memory shortage. It turned out, that shrink_active_list() calls pagevec_strip(), which in turn calls try_to_release_page() which finally calls try_to_free_buffers() which drops the corresponding buffers; if this succeeds, it seems to cause the page to become freed later. This causes pointers of indirect blocks of the filesystem of the miniroot ramdisk to be replaced by zero-filled pages later in the the system's history. I fixed this by adding a new flag PG_ramdisk in the include file page-flags.h, setting the flag during ramdisk loading in ramdisk_commit_write() and checking for the flag in try_to_free_buffers() and retruning 0 as result immediately without freeing the buffers. I am not aware if that is the adequate way to solve the problem or if there is a solution that requires fewer and more localized changes of the system, avoiding to give the ramdisk pages a specific treatment I did not observe this problem prior to kernel version 2.6.19.1, but I'm not sure whether ths was simply caused by coincidental circumstances during startup. Peter Bier _______________________________________________________________ SMS schreiben mit WEB.DE FreeMail - einfach, schnell und kostenguenstig. Jetzt gleich testen! http://f.web.de/?mc=021192 - 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/
