That Linux 5.12 Severe Data Corruption Bug Hits Intel CI Systems - Issue Caused By Swap File

[torsionbar28]

The correct way is to dedicate a RAID array of NVMe drives as the swap. Then you only need 1 GB of system RAM.

[pal666]

At 30 years of age, you'd think linux outta be mature enough to handle a swap file property.

bad commits are very recent. and article mentions it

[pal666]

The correct way is to dedicate a RAID array of NVMe drives as the swap.

you don't need raid array, just add one swap partition on each drive, kernel will interleave them automatically

[Beherit]

At the same time left wondering why more folks aren't hitting this nasty bug and screaming about it

Not me, sounds perfectly healthy to not use alpha/beta/rc kernels on any system used for actual work.

[birdie]

A pre-release kernel has a bug? Colour me surprised I guess?

Not a nice one, sure, but if you are running this kind of kernel, it's at your own risk.

Except it's a crappy excuse. The code which is sent upstream to the Linux kernel must at the very least be thoroughly tested and work for the person who has written it and it looks like it doesn't.

QA/QC in Linux continues to lack severly and the only Linux kernel which I trust comes from Redhat. Even so called "stable" kernel releases contain terrible regressions and bugs.

[birdie]

I go with zram-backed swap and earlyoom. Works perfectly for my needs with 16 gigs of RAM unless something's leaking, in which case something's going to get OOM-killed no matter how much there is.

I stopped using swap on all my devices and servers over 15 years ago.

If your system doesn't have enough RAM to accommodate all the running processes swap in most cases will not help, it will only slow everything down and stopping some processes will be faster than trying to multitask and rape your storage device.

[franglais125]

rape your storage device.

I have a Thinkpad. It likes it rough. /jk

[Bladeforce]

Does this affect just the root drive or any drive attached to the system?

[dwagner]

I would not have known where to find "swapping to files" being used in the wild. All the systems I maintain use exactly zero swap, because if they had to, performance would suck anyway. And when RAM was precious decades ago, the overhead of using a filesystem instead of a partition for swapping was way to high to make "swapping to files" attractive.

Can someone say why Intel used such file-based swap space?

[Yttrium]

I would not have known where to find "swapping to files" being used in the wild. All the systems I maintain use exactly zero swap, because if they had to, performance would suck anyway. And when RAM was precious decades ago, the overhead of using a filesystem instead of a partition for swapping was way to high to make "swapping to files" attractive.

Can someone say why Intel used such file-based swap space?

Not Intel but, swap enables the possibility of hibernation. File-based swap saves a partition and only take up filesize according to your RAM contents.