Re: ext3 journal on software raid (was Re: PROBLEM: Kernel 2.6.10 crashing repeatedly and hard)

Alvin Oga wrote:

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Brad Campbell wrote:

quoted

Picture lpd gets swapped out on a friday night. Over the weekend it is not used and the drive 
develops a bad sector in the middle of the file. Monday morning I want to print and the system tries 
to page lpd back in again. *boom*.

admin issue ... user related services like printers should NOT be on
critical servers and take down what everybody will notice due to unrelated
printer problems

Ok, perhaps bad example. Pick any service that may get swapped out. Hell.. any bad block in any swap 
space that develops while that block is in use is going to cause a problem.

swap ...  swap partitions is by default checked for bad blocks during
formatting as swap ...
	- it is highly unlikely that you'd get a bad sector in swap space

Yeah? I have 3 hard disks sitting on my desk that say you are wrong..

- any normal bad things happening to user area of the disks will also
  happen to swap space

I agree.

 	- but its unlikely that swap will have bad blocks, while its 
	more likely that users did nto do a badblock check during
	formatting across the 100GB or 300GB disks ... and even more
	time twiddling your thumbs on raid'd disks

I strongly disagree.
I have a 250GB drive I just swapped out that was "growing" bad sectors at the rate of 3 per day that 
did a clean badblocks 5 months ago when it was installed.

I refuse to argue this any more. If you want to tell the world that there is no benefit to swap on 
raid, go ahead.

Brad