[Xen-devel] /lib oddity

[James H. <Ja...@be...>]

I am having something really really weird happen, it's a bit confusing
so bear with me...

I am testing out an iscsi+raid1+lvm root filesystem for xenU, and it
won't boot. It was booting a few days ago, but then crashing horribly
shortly after boot due to the network hang, but I had since rebuilt the
new filesystem, copying it across from another xenU domain.

Suspecting filesystem corruption, I rebooted with the original (non
iscsi) filesystem, mounted the iscsi filesystem on /mnt, and compared
sums of various key directories, and /lib showed up as different but
nothing else was different that I could see.

So I tried re-copying /lib with 'cp -ax /lib /mnt', and the recompared
it and there were still differences, although the corruption was in
different files.

Then I tried 'cp -ax /lib /tmp' and then compared those, but they were
identical.

Then I tried 'cp -ax /tmp/lib /mnt' and bingo, no differences.

Then, for good measure, I tried 'cp -a /lib /mnt/tmp', and sure enough
there was corruption again.

Which leads me to conclude that if I copy /lib to another filesystem, it
gets screwed up, but if I copy it to the same filesystem, and then make
a copy of that copy, it's fine.

Any explanations? I need some sleep right now but will try tomorrow with
a non-iscsi filesystem to take that out of the explanation. But the only
thing that's changed since the corruption has appeared is that I've
updated xen.

If it makes any difference, all domains are Debian Sarge, /lib/tls is
renamed to /lib/tls.disabled, and I aren't supplying any odd kernel
parameters. Writable pagetables are enabled in the kernel build.

Thanks

James