Re: Apparent serious progressive ext4 data corruption bug in 3.6.3 (and other stable branches?)

On 10/24/2012 01:40 AM, Nix wrote:

It's true that in less than a week
probably not all that many people have rebooted often enough to trip
over this.

I hope.

Fwiw, i got a fried root filesystem (ext4) on one machine last week. It 
was on 3.5.3 or 3.5.5. Since there was nothing in the logs and the 
kernel was modified (CK, BFQ) and tainted (nvidia) I did not notify any 
maintainers. I have not had the time yet to rebuild the machine 
(unfortunately that will be laboursome), so the users cannot do their 
homework or attend to their social life for the time being...

The pattern was indeed characterized by a sequence of reboots (I am 
told), and in a weird fashion files started to disappear from the root 
filesystem (I first noticed /etc/groups missing, and after further fscks 
and reboots login became impossible (I assume that /etc/passwd and or 
/etc/shadow are buggered). I haven't assessed the extent of the damage yet.

Still not sure whether it is related to the bug in question, of course.

Martin