Missing inodes on V/386 & News

[T. William Wells]

In article <804 at micropen> dave at micropen (David F. Carlson) writes:
: In article <456 at wa3wbu.UUCP>, john at wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) writes:
: >
: >   I have been having a repeating problem recently with loosing inodes
: > in my News file system. I have a seperate file system ( /dev/dsk/1s3 )
: > on my 2nd hard disk for /usr/spool/news. About every other day the inode
: > count gets screwed up.
: > John Gayman, WA3WBU              |           UUCP: uunet!wa3wbu!john
:
: Although it appears that fsck "fixes" the problem, it does not!
: Tar out the file system to /tmp.  mkfs the file system again.  Bump up
: the inodes so that you are guaranteed to run out of blocks before inodes.
: My news is is 15 meg and has 15000 inodes (yes, one per block.)  I just
: got tired of this and went crazy, but it *never* has had the problem again!

The problem is that there is a kernel bug in pre 3.2 SysV systems. It
causes the file system to think that there are no free inodes when
there really are. What fsck fixes is the count of free inodes in the
superblock; that permits the system to continue working. However, the
bug hasn't gone away; next time the right conditions occur bang goes
the count and away goes your file system.

Increasing the number of inodes ought to decrease the probability of
the bug occuring; it does *not* eliminate it.

As I just recently posted, this is a fairly easy thing to fix if you
are a kernel hacker. I have a patch for Microport SysV/386 3.0e. If
anyone wants it, send me e-mail. I've also heard of patches for other
systems.

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill at twwells.com