From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Mon May 21 19:34:06 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E999516A400; Mon, 21 May 2007 19:34:06 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kris@obsecurity.org) Received: from elvis.mu.org (elvis.mu.org [192.203.228.196]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D6E9813C4C6; Mon, 21 May 2007 19:34:06 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kris@obsecurity.org) Received: from obsecurity.dyndns.org (elvis.mu.org [192.203.228.196]) by elvis.mu.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3050E1A3C19; Mon, 21 May 2007 12:35:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: by obsecurity.dyndns.org (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 03B22513BC; Mon, 21 May 2007 15:34:05 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 15:34:05 -0400 From: Kris Kennaway To: Gore Jarold Message-ID: <20070521193405.GA80086@xor.obsecurity.org> References: <20070521174818.GA64826@lor.one-eyed-alien.net> <475187.33232.qm@web63006.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <475187.33232.qm@web63006.mail.re1.yahoo.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.2i Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org, Brooks Davis Subject: How to report bugs (Re: VERY frustrated with FreeBSD/UFS stability - please help or comment...) X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 19:34:07 -0000 On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 12:16:33PM -0700, Gore Jarold wrote: > > > a) am I really the only person in the world that > > moves > > > around millions of inodes throughout the day ? Am > > I > > > the only person in the world that has ever filled > > up a > > > snapshotted FS (or a quota'd FS, for that matter) > > ? There are known panics that may occur when a snapshot grows to fill a filesystem. I am told that these are fundamentally difficult to avoid. You are certainly not the only persion who operates on millions of inodes, but it is disingenuous to suggest that this is either a "mainstream" or "simple" workload. Also, I personally know of several people who do this without apparent problem, so that is further evidence that whatever problems you are seeing are something specific to your workload or configuration, or you are just unlucky. The larger issue here is that apparently you have been suffering in silence for many years with your various frustrations and they have finally exploded into this email. This is really a poor way to approach the goal of getting your problems solved: it is fundamentally a failure of your expectations to think that without adequately reporting your bugs that they will somehow get fixed. When you encounter a FreeBSD bug, file a bug report ("PR"). We have extensive documentation on how to write effective bug reports, but to summarize some key steps: 1) Provide a reproducible test case. As Brooks noted, this is a key step that will greatly increase the chances of your bug being reproduced, identified and fixed. You failed to do it before now, so we were left completely in the dark. 2) Provide sufficient debugging when the problem occurs. Consult the developers handbook for a full discussion, but it involves things like configuring a debugger, obtaining process traces, enabling additional debugging options, etc. Without these two things there is really very little that a developer can do to try and guess what might possibly be happening on your system. However, it appears that we might now be making some progress: > ssh user@host rm -rf backup.2 > ssh user@host mv backup.1 backup.2 > ssh user@host cp -al backup.0 backup.1 > rsync /files user@host:/backup.0 > > The /files in question range from .2 to 2.2 million > files, all told. This means that when this script > runs, it first either deletes OR unlinks up to 2 > million items. Then it does a (presumably) zero cost > move operation. Then it does a hard-link-creating cp > of the same (up to 2 million) items. Please provide additional details of how the filesystems in question are configured, your kernel configuration, hardware configuration, and the debugging data referred to in 2) above. Thanks, Kris