From: mj@dfv.rwth-aachen.de (Martin Junius) Subject: BUG: crashing program kills file system Date: 19 Aug 1992 19:58:39 GMT
The following bug I ran across while trying to uncompress/tar a
.tar.Z file directly from floppy disk:
uncompress died with a core dump, obviously it didn't like the
garbage right after the last byte of the .tar.Z file (can be
reproduced with 2.2.2dmisc.tar.Z from the GCC distribution and
RAWRITE). This can be solved by dd'ing the files to floppy disk
with `conv=sync', but that's not the problem.
The problem is that uncompress while writing to disk and core
dumping corrupts the file system!!! Looks like the kernel
does some strange things to the buffers while dumping core, so
that the currently written files are not written to disk, but
blocks for them are marked used, or something like that. After
some more disk activity your file system will be ready for a new
install.
Maybe someone should take a deep look in the core dump code ...
One way to prevent the file system from getting corrupted is
_immediately_ after the crash deleting this extracted files and
then calling "fsck -r", which will be able to restore the file
system.
Martin
-- _____ _____ | |___ | Martin Junius FIDO: 2:242/6.1 | | | | | | Communication Networks Internet: mj@dfv.rwth-aachen.de |_|_|_|@work| Aachen U of Technology Phone: ++49-241-8790220 (voice)