Hi! Antoine Martin wrote: > Even if it its, it could still be a kernel bug (and not a UML bug). > Which type of filesystem are you using?
From latest 2.6.19.2 kernel change log: "[PATCH] VM: Fix nasty and subtle race in shared mmap'ed page writeback The VM layer (on the face of it, fairly reasonably) expected that when it does a ->writepage() call to the filesystem, it would write out the full page at that point in time. Especially since it had earlier marked the whole page dirty with "set_page_dirty()". But that isn't actually the case: ->writepage() does not actually write a page, it writes the parts of the page that have been explicitly marked dirty before, *and* that had not got written out for other reasons since the last time we told it they were dirty. That last caveat is the important one. Which _most_ of the time ends up being the whole page (since we had called "set_page_dirty()" on the page earlier), but if the filesystem had done any dirty flushing of its own (for example, to honor some internal write ordering guarantees), it might end up doing only a partial page IO (or none at all) when ->writepage() is actually called. That is the correct thing in general (since we actually often _want_ only the known-dirty parts of the page to be written out), but the shared dirty page handling had implicitly forgotten about these details, and had a number of cases where it was doing just the "->writepage()" part, without telling the low-level filesystem that the whole page might have been re-dirtied as part of being mapped writably into user space. Since most of the time the FS did actually write out the full page, we didn't notice this for a loong time, and this needed some really odd patterns to trigger. But it caused occasional corruption with rtorrent and with the Debian "apt" database, because both use shared mmaps to update the end result." This could be the cause for the problem. Jyrki Jaakkola ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ User-mode-linux-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/user-mode-linux-user
