Serious Bug In 2.4.15/2.5.0

John Ineson writes: "There is a bug in the latest kernel releases, that causes fs corruption on umount. A lot of people have already been hit by this, so for now I suggest you hold fire on booting those new kernels. More dead-duck than greased-turkey. Two possible fixes are being discussed on linux-kernel." Colin Bayer adds links to a story at the Register and Al Viro's fix. Update: 11/25 00:39 GMT by T : Tarkie writes "Linux 2.4.16-pre1 is out, as detailed at NewsForge. If you've been having the filesystem corruptions, might be worth a try so that 2.4.16 can be out ASAP!"

Comments

Re:Alan Cox

[linux_warp]

Also, straight out of alans diary:

September 29th - Much kernel patching going on. The -ac kernel tree seems to be turning into the stable tree as Linus merges odder, weirder and more alarming things. I just hope he knows what he is doing.
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Sounds like confidence to me :)

Re:Filesystems

[Colin Bayer]

It afflicts every filesystem. However, rebooting with the file /forcefsck extant forces it to run an fsck (and fix the corruption) on boot.

Also of help might be the Alt+SysRq keys; if you sync the drives and unmount them in single user mode before reboot, you should reduce or eliminate the corruption.

Re:Don't throw stones in Glass Houses

[fishebulb]

yes this is quite a serious bug, but 2 things set this apart from MS. It will be fixed within 24-48 hours. The frequency of these bugs are a bit smaller than MS's bug of the day (which very often are large holes).

Re:A Workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

The strange thing is, out of habit (years ago, you always had to remember to sync on Unix, and due to a bug, you always had to sync more than once), I always sync, sync, sync, umount...