"Buehl, Reiner" [off-list ref] writes:

Hi Dimitry,

quoted

How does it happen? Do you remember any power failures happened
previously?

I had no power failures. The first such error appears always approx. 2
minutes after booting the system. This behavior started after I moved
the md RAID fro

Hm.. So may be this is not a barrier related.

m two smaller Seagate disks to the currently used 1TB disks. There for my first thought was a failed disk or memory but they seem to be ok based on the SMART and memtest results.

You may possibly force this to happen sooner like follows:
find /your-mnt/ -ls > /dev/null #fore fstat for all inodes

quoted

What mount options do you used? Probably you use default options
which means that fs was mounted w/o barrier support. Even if was
mounted
with barriers, your raid driver may simply ignore it.

I use default options and software raid (mdadm). Does mdadm handle barriers correct?

quoted

Can you please post following info:
1) mount options  and cat /proc/mount

/dev/md1        /               ext3            defaults                        01

bilbo:~# cat /proc/mounts 
rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
none /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
none /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
udev /dev tmpfs rw,relatime,size=10240k,mode=755 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/a059fdf2-4ff6-4c30-ba7f-77c85e7f5d1b / ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0
tmpfs /lib/init/rw tmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,mode=755 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0
/dev/mapper/vg_data-lv_video /video ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/mapper/vg_data-lv_mpg /video/film/mpg ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0
rpc_pipefs /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw,relatime 0 0
automount(pid3007) /mnt/auto autofs rw,relatime,fd=4,pgrp=3007,timeout=120,minproto=2,maxproto=4,indirect 0 0
automount(pid2964) /mnt/usb autofs rw,relatime,fd=4,pgrp=2964,timeout=2,minproto=2,maxproto=4,indirect 0 0
automount(pid3062) /net autofs rw,relatime,fd=4,pgrp=3062,timeout=300,minproto=2,maxproto=4,indirect 0 0
nfsd /proc/fs/nfsd nfsd rw,relatime 0 0

quoted

2) Write something to your fs and sync;
   like follows "echo test > /path_to_your_mnt/test ; sync"

Done.

quoted

3) dmesg log after stage(2)

Nothing got written to dmesg during step 2.

This test was necessary to check that your md has barriers support
but this may happen only if you passed '-obarrier=1' explicitly
Since you use default mount options, then you use ext3 without barriers
so this test is not necessary

I currently have 2 of the EXT3-fs errors in dmesg but writing and syncing did not produce another one. 

Best regards,
Reiner.