2.6.0+ and loopback ext2

2.6.0+ and loopback ext2

[Daniel Robbins]

Hi All,

I'm having a very strange problem with loopback under 2.6. I can create
a loopback ext2 filesystem, mount it, and then trying to copy files to
it. Sometimes, I'll get a "no space left on device" error. Then I'll try
the exact same copy again, and it will work. The copy seems to fail
randomly, about 25% of the time. I can repeat the copy operation and
have it fail, then work, then work. I can repeat everything and have it
work, then fail, then work again.

The filesystem is created using the following command:

mke2fs -m 0 -F -b 4096 -q my.loop

And is mounted using the following command:

mount -t ext2 -o loop my.loop loopmount

This is on an amd64 system; haven't tried replicating this on an x86 yet
(though my understanding is that loopback implementation is effectively
arch-independent?) Could this be the fault of util-linux's "/bin/mount"
command not containing a magic 2.6 hook for loopback? Tried rebuilding
util-linux, and it didn't help.

Any help would be welcome.

Best Regards,

Daniel Robbins