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

[M@GOid]

I was laughing at all the Windows 10 updates shenanigans since October, but looks like we have our own problems too.

I'm glad I stayed with kernel 4.15 (Kubuntu 18.04), after the first benchmark Michael did showing only marginal improvements in most games since the beginning of the year.

[DrYak]

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.


Raka555 : yup. proof that we need to kidnap Linus and make a few (git...) clones of him to keep aside, just in case.

(...in case he gets (ext4-) corrupted?)

[dungeon]

Debian Sid is on 4.18.20, but 4.19.5 is still in experimental repo of Debian

I can't reproduce this too on Sid, with 4.19.5

I tried 4.19.5 on Debian 8 LTS even and can't reproduce it there too, so no idea

Seems like happen when you have CONFIG_EXT4_ENCRYPTION enabled, even when you use or don't use encryption or whatever

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/11/28/856

[jpg44]

And I was thinking that maybe switching back to EXT4 (+HW RAID/MDADM) was safer than keeping Btrfs (no RAID5/6)…

RAID 5/6 has been patched up, it is still being tested but it should be ready shortly. If you use btrfs it should be very reliable but of course cold backups are always strongly recommended. Another alternative you might want to look at if you need to store lots of data is Ceph for data partitions. btrfs will end up being more reliable than ext4 in the long run.

[Etherman]

I tend to believe corruption really does come from outside of ext4 driver. 4.19 is a total wreck of a release. People report all kinds of problems. I myself was getting random freezes every few hours. I do not recall such a disastrous release.

Dont forget the kernels(!) that corrupted bcache devices. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa....14.2-Released

[torsionbar28]

And I was thinking that maybe switching back to EXT4 (+HW RAID/MDADM) was safer than keeping Btrfs (no RAID5/6)…

Been using MDADM + XFS for years, no problems here, it's a rock solid combo.

[Steffen Bergner]

Yes, it's true. My little monitoring PC with small SSD and kernel 4.19.2/3 got crashed ext4. Reboot and fsck fixed it. Back to 4.18.16-lowlatency works fine again.

kernel="4.18.16"; kernel2="$kernel"; knum="041816"; kdate="${knum}.201810200431"; echo "http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v$kernel/"; rm -iv ~/downloads/l*.deb; cd ~/downloads && [[ -e l*.deb ]] && ls -lisa l*.deb; sleep 5 && wget -c -Yon http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v${kernel}/linux-headers-${kernel2}-${knum}_${kernel2}-${kdate}_all.deb && wget -c -Yon http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v${kernel}/linux-headers-${kernel2}-${knum}-lowlatency_${kernel2}-${kdate}_amd64.deb && wget -c -Yon http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v${kernel}/linux-modules-${kernel2}-${knum}-lowlatency_${kernel2}-${kdate}_amd64.deb && wget -c -Yon http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v${kernel}/linux-image-unsigned-${kernel2}-${knum}-lowlatency_${kernel2}-${kdate}_amd64.deb && ls *.deb* -lisa && sleep 10 && sudo eatmydata dpkg -i *.deb && sudo eatmydata depmod -a && sudo eatmydata update-initramfs -u && sudo eatmydata update-grub

[aufkrawall]

I'm having a weird issue with an ext4 data partition which sometimes is unmountable. Highly annoying, but at least not data corruption.

[RealNC]

Last time this happened was in 4.14 IIRC? Which is the previous LTS...

[Flaburgan]

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

Mind sharing your config? Hardware, kernel version, etc...