Some Users Have Been Hitting EXT4 File-System Corruption On Linux 4.19

[birdie]

Is there any way to check for corruptions on mounted file-systems? I reverted to 4.18 due to other issues, but would like to check whether 4.19 did any damage...

As far as I know only Windows 10 allows to check mounted NTFS. As for Linux reboot into single mode and run `e2fsck -v -C 0 -t -D`

I've already done that since I lost a couple of file to 4.19. :-(

[elvenbone]

Xfce is stable but my custom kernels are not when I am testing them. Debian has nothing to do with my GPU drivers, I use Oibaf ppa too.

Ok, I see. Sorry for the trolling, I couldn't resist.

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Is there any way to check for corruptions on mounted file-systems? I reverted to 4.18 due to other issues, but would like to check whether 4.19 did any damage...

[Ardje]

ALRBP : yup, I am also feeling funny when the Btrfs that I am using everywhere (laptop, workstation, server, phone, pi...) happens to be the stable one, compared to venerable ext4. That's some irony.

I have yet to see corruption on my desktop use of btrfs, but in any environment with real I/O load btrfs has always managed to kill itself. I even went so far as to have a btrfs.fsck running for over 6 months on a $10k machine before it ate up all the swapspace we could give it (450GB of swap) to have it parse it's 250GB metadata. As a test of course, and it failed.
That was some time ago. The way it could handle snapshots did outweigh the amount of do-over work, as it was a backup of a backup of a backup.
To be clear: I had my fair share of ext4 bugs, but they never lead to filesystem corruption, just to OOMs. Out of all filesystems I've tested it was the most stable one.
Still I hope to switch more and more to f2fs, btrfs and bcachefs.
f2fs gave me my fair share of problems, but they were 100% attributable to the bad shape of the sdhc-pci for the SoC in the WIN1. In all other cases (running it on eMMC and on uSD on decent hardware like odroids: 100% trustworthy).
sdhc-pci still has bugs when it comes to the WIN2, but it doesn't seem to lose writes anymore.

[elvenbone]

Ext4 is stable. old/broken ssds, 1000Hz timer kernels with other buggy drivers are not stable. Read the bug discussion. I am testing kernels with the latest amdgpu driver and it is a very violent event for the ssd when the system freezes to some X desktop incompatibility vsync bug. Sure btrfs would not work any better when the whole kernel goes crazy.

You are having freezes on Debian with XFCE? I thought it was stable.

[NateHubbard]

I've been running 4.19.x on three Gentoo systems for several weeks now, with not problems. I just checked, and "# CONFIG_EXT4_ENCRYPTION is not set".

I've got 27 days uptime on 4.19.0-rc8, I do have the CONFIG_EXT4_ENCRYPTION set and I'm not seeing issues. I strongly suspect the issue is something other than ext4 itself, but I have no idea.
Whenever something like this comes up, thousands of people will chime in with all the different random problems they have, some caused by bad hardware, some caused by who knows what. I wouldn't put much faith in responses on forums like these because there are way too many possibilities with all the varied hardware and software combinations, not to mention knowledge levels.
I'll trust the devs to sort it all out, and I don't envy their job.

And calling people of different opinion "lunatics" reflects the spirit of that CoC, I guess?

Well, bigoted people who want to continue being racist, sexist, misogynist, ableist, anti-Semitic, Islamaphobic etc. aren't people with different opinions - they're crappy horrible people.

But enough of this bullshit - I'm not interested in arguing uselessly with such people, and to continue polluting this thread with nonsense.

[Mangix]

So Linus leaves and the kernel becomes exciting instead of boring? Too bad.

[peppercats]

and here I thought my SSDs were going bad

[marlock]

Hey folks, just came by to say that "journalctl -b-1 -p3 | tail -100" showed me a bunch of new failures on my HDD too now, so it's probably not SSD hardware related... reverted to 4.18.x for now, can't afford to break my main PC like this while waiting for a fix.

[Veerappan]

I'm getting ext4 corruption on 4.19 that I don't have on 4.18. Thought it was just me.

Me too. When I had 4.19.1 installed I was getting readings filesystems when I came into work in the mornings regularly. Roll back to 4.18 and it's fine.

Note: I'm running on an encrypted root partition, so I wasn't sure if it was ext4 or the encrytencr layer that was messing up.

Haswell based Thinkpad t440p with a 480-500gb SSD if it makes a difference