Re: [PATCH] raid superblock sanity checking (validate_sb)

On Monday August 12, andrew.r.cress@intel.com wrote:

I've written a patch to help this problem.  I guess now is a good time to
submit it to the group for comments.  The patch is against kernel 2.4.18,
but should be useful going forward as well.  It uses a common validation
subroutine when the superblock gets changed, before it is written.  I've
been using it for a while now with a raid1 root mirror doing various nasty
tests and haven't had any more problems.  There could be some additional
tuning to the validation logic though.

Neil, 

You've seen a lot of these type problems corrected with mdadm.  Does this
cover most of the cases?

If there is a kernel bug that corrupts the superblock, then we should
fix the bug, not put in lots of validation to see if the bug has hit..

And if a superblock did get corrupted, then fixing it is a userspace
(mdadm) issue, not kernel.

Or maybe I'm not understanding what problem you are trying to solve.

NeilBrown