> i just made a 8Gig filesystem
> (RAID0 of two 4G disks, mke2fs -i 1024 on /dev/md0 ),
> with no problems at all under pre2.0.31
So you have been lucky ;-) I've seen failures to create 600MB filesystems
on 64MB RAM machines. And I've seen success creating 24G filesystems on
32MB RAM machines...
> This was a P90 with 32MB RAM. I think somebody looking after this
> needs a small machine.
Just boot with mem=4M and you will be unable to create a 1G filesystem;
this works reliably with 2.0.29 (and of course with pre-2.0.31 using
buffer.c and fs.h from 2.0.29). You should start an installation for this
test. When there are lots of other processes running chances are good that
some memory is freed just in time to complete the mke2fs.
BTW: The problem does even show up without stress on unloaded machines:
One of our servers died after 20 days because the network driver needed
some memory and didn't get it. I saw a X-server die with signal 7 on a
system with uptime 29 days. Load was at 0.1, almost no swap was used.
Occasionally you can see xosview die saying "unable to open
/proc/interrupts", normal kernel compiles (no "make -j") dying with signal
7, floppy not working even when compiled in (no DMA) and many other
failures...
I'm currently replacing buffer.c on all our machines...
I hope Linus will do the same for 2.0.31 if the real reason for the
problem is not found.
> Ciao
> Dietmar
Hubert mantel@suse.de