On 1/25/10, Thayer Williams <thayerw@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Javier Vasquez <j.e.vasquez.v@gmail.com> wrote:
Bad thing that xscreensaver corrupted / so that it couldn't be unlocked, and under console there was no way to loging, some misplaced inodes or something...
Hard reboot was required, and then at first /tmp was so corrupted that it was necessary a phisical fix...
I can't seem to connect the dots here. How do you propose that it was xscreensaver that corrupted ext4?
While it does sound like your ext4 partition may be corrupted, that doesn't mean that xscreensaver is to blame; rather it was just another victim. If the partition is corrupted then reinstalling package xyz isn't going to fix it. You need to wipe it and rebuild.
AFAIK there are no known issues with xscreensaver corrupting a filesystem and it seems rather unlikely. The much more likely case is that somehow your partition did become corrupted, but it wasn't noticed until some time after xscreensaver kicked in.
Hmm, let me rephrase my initial statement. The only initial symptom was xscreensaver. It was running when all of sudden the FS got corrupted and I couldn't loging, not from xscreensaver, not from console, etc. At this point I have a pretty stable system. Nothing fails. Only when I loads xscreensaver (xscreesaver-demo), then the system doesn't freeze but an equivalent thing happens, although the window manager is up, I can't get any command to work, everything fails due to libraries issues, starting from xscreensaver itself which is not able to load gnome.so I believe. Again even moving to console doesn't work, since going there bunch of messages pop up saying that the "/" ext4 partition is corrupted... Rebooting restores things to normal with no corruption at all. Fixing through fsck -f doesn't do a thing since the FS is found with no problems. The problem only tirggers when xscreensaver is launched. It might be the problem is somewhere else, but it only gets evident when launching xscreensaver. No other thing triggers these problems. I'm as surprised by this behavior as anyone else. I've been using linux for about 10 years, and I haven't ever experienced this weird thing (I've experienced FS corruption before, but not immediately trigger by xscreensaver or similar, and never being able to recover by just rebooting, always needed fsck)... So for now the only clue I have is xscreensaver triggereing the issues, no other thing to blame at sight... Wipping the system out might be an option, but it takes more than a while to have everything installed from scratch and have everything tunned. So I don't want to make this an option unless there's nothing else to be done. Fsck is already done, so that won't do... It's hard to do anything else, since cat, ps, vim, everything fails... Thanks, -- Javier.