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Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 03:37:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>, "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Linux 2.4.5-ac14
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On 16 Jun 2001, Andi Kleen wrote:

> "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > Alan Cox writes:
> >  > Because right now I dont consider the 2.4.6 page cache ext2 stuff safe
> >  > enough to merge. I'm letting someone else be the sucide squad.. so far it
> >  > looks like it is indeed fine but I want to wait and see more yet
> > 
> > If it means anything it has already withstanded a few
> > cerebus-->fsck_check-->cerebus rounds on machines here
> > in my lab.
> 
> ... it also seems to make ppc not boot anymore.

OK, after looking at the bug report things smell very strange:

	* kernel had barfed on lookup for /dev/console.
	* kernel had found /dev - right inode number, etc.
	* read_cache_page(inode->i_mapping, n, ext2_readpage) on it
gave all-zeroes for each page within first 32Kb (size of /dev on box in
question).
	* filesystem is not corrupted.
	* all that stuff had happened with cold caches.
	* kernel was 2.4.6-pre3 + some unspecified modifications.

Very odd. Could somebody try vanilla 2.4.6-pre1 on a PPC box? I _really_
doubt that it might be an architecture-specific problem in directory
code - it would simply fail the lookup for  /dev in that case.

I'll try to find a PPC nearby, but it may be tricky on weekend. So if
somebody wants to help... Notice that problem was on read-only mount,
so it can be tested without risking fs corruption - just try to boot
with init=/bin/sh and do ls -lR, etc.