jeff@swusrgrp.UUCP (Jeff Tye sys adm) (06/05/89)
This has probably been asked a zillion times before but could somebody please tell me in a short paragraph or two about what causes the inode table to get crashed when running news. It used to happen on my system alot (everyday) but now happens maybe once every two weeks (always at an inconvenient time). What causes it? Is it a bug in news? Or is it a bug in UNIX? Why don't other programs cause it to happen? (at least on my system) Is there a fix on the horizon? I hate having to run down to my office in the middle of the night to run 'fsck' to fix the inode table. :-( -- Jeff Tye southwest!/usr/group The Southwest U.S. chapter of /usr/group c/o Copperstate Business Systems voice (602) 244-9391 ncar!noao!asuvax!hrc!swusrgrp!jeff swusrgrp (602) 275-2541
wescott@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM (Mike Wescott) (06/05/89)
In article <1217@swusrgrp.UUCP> jeff@swusrgrp.UUCP (Jeff Tye sys adm) writes: > [...] could somebody > please tell me in a short paragraph or two about what causes the inode table > to get crashed when running news. It's not news that does it, at least not directly. It is a kernel bug. The SysV kernel keeps track of the lowest unused inode, in order to improve the scan time to find new inodes. There is, however, a bug whereby the kernel can free up an inode that is lower than the current "lowest" and not update its current concept of lowest inode. Since searches for unused inodes begin with this "lowest" inode, others that are lower in number can be "lost". The pattern of additions and deletions to the filesystem caused by news seems to exacerbate the problem. > Is there a fix on the horizon? Your vendor should have a fix by now. ialloc() in alloc.c can be changed to rescan the inode list from the beginning one more time if the kernel finds that it has run out of inodes. -Mike Wescott -- -Mike Wescott mike.wescott@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM