[arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

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Javier Vasquez

25 Jan 2010 25 Jan '10

3:14 a.m.

Hi all, I have 4 boxes, all with the same partitioning scheme and using ext4 for all of them. This weird thing has only showed up in one of them. Some time back while playing some video and with xscreensaver active, the timeout for xscreensaver expired and then password was required... 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... After all that, what happens is that whenever launching xscreensaver-demo, if I had a terminal open then doing cat, or any other thing fails, since no libraries are found... If at that moment I go to console, the message I get is ext4 /dev/sda7 (partition for /) is corrupted with some inode misplacement or similar... Then at that time there's nothing else to do but to hard reset... BTW, when loading xscreensaver-demo from terminal, the 1st thing that shows up is: (xscreensaver-demo:2830): libglade-WARNING **: Could not load support for `gnome': libgnome.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory I think that is due exactly for the same thing, that ext4 got corrupted, since by doing cat or any other command shows that libraries are not found or something... Has anyone seen this? Any way to get xscreensaver working back? It was actually working before, and it is working on all other boxes. Weird thing is that without xscreensaver I don't get any problem, so my work around right now is not to use it. I initially got under the impression that the ext4 corruption wa sdue to something else, so I re-installed all packages, but that didn't help (got list of packages, and install them all through pacman -S)... If this is known and there's way to overcome it, other than just not using xscreesaver at all, please let me know... Thanks, -- Javier.

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Thayer Williams

25 Jan 25 Jan

3:36 p.m.

New subject: [arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Javier Vasquez 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.

Xavier Chantry

4:08 p.m.

New subject: [arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Thayer Williams wrote:

...

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Javier Vasquez 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.

If it's a filesystem issue and not hardware, then hopefully running fsck will be enough.

Javier Vasquez

4:21 p.m.

New subject: [arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

On 1/25/10, Xavier Chantry wrote:

...

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Thayer Williams wrote:

...
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Javier Vasquez 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.

If it's a filesystem issue and not hardware, then hopefully running fsck will be enough.

:-) I've done it already several times. Actually when I get the ext4 corruption, I can reboot and everything work necely after rebooting. If I use a live CD to do "fsck -p -f" I get actually no error at all other than the common non contiguous stuff. Corruption only happens when runing xscreensaver. By not using it I have no problems at all. Corruption seems to be non persistent since it goes away by rebooting (although hard reboot is required once it happened). -- Javier.

Javier Vasquez

4:40 p.m.

New subject: [arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

On 1/25/10, Thayer Williams wrote:

...

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Javier Vasquez 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.

Damjan Georgievski

11:47 p.m.

New subject: [arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

...

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.

Test your memory first. (use memtest86+ for that) I'd suggest to test the memory of your graphic card too if I knew how to do that. -- damjan

Javier Vasquez

21 Feb 21 Feb

8:59 p.m.

New subject: [arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

On 1/25/10, Damjan Georgievski wrote:

...

...
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.

Test your memory first. (use memtest86+ for that) I'd suggest to test the memory of your graphic card too if I knew how to do that.

-- damjan

Amazing, it looks like it's the ATI video driver. See forum: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=91295 I do have an ATI video card: --- VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV250 [Mobility FireGL 9000] (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) --- Bad thing it's still kind of unknown how to solve or to work around it. Well, the work around is not to use xscreensaver, :-(. I don't remember if I can get xlockmore to lock when there's no activity... Well, I'll have to look into something different than xscreensaver then. More amazing, why does the problem only manifests with xscreensaver? There's no problem with any other application... Any ways, I just wanted to provide update. Thx, -- Javier.

Xavier Chantry

9:37 p.m.

New subject: [arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 9:59 PM, Javier Vasquez wrote:

...

Bad thing it's still kind of unknown how to solve or to work around it. Well, the work around is not to use xscreensaver, :-(. I don't remember if I can get xlockmore to lock when there's no activity... Well, I'll have to look into something different than xscreensaver then.

More amazing, why does the problem only manifests with xscreensaver? There's no problem with any other application... Any ways, I just wanted to provide update.

Are you using a GL screensaver ? If yes, then why ? :) Are you running any other GL apps ? Maybe have a look at http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14535

Javier Vasquez

10:23 p.m.

New subject: [arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

On 2/21/10, Xavier Chantry wrote:

...

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 9:59 PM, Javier Vasquez wrote:

...
Bad thing it's still kind of unknown how to solve or to work around it. Well, the work around is not to use xscreensaver, :-(. I don't remember if I can get xlockmore to lock when there's no activity... Well, I'll have to look into something different than xscreensaver then.

More amazing, why does the problem only manifests with xscreensaver? There's no problem with any other application... Any ways, I just wanted to provide update.

Are you using a GL screensaver ? If yes, then why ? :) Are you running any other GL apps ?

Maybe have a look at http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14535

I'm using the stock xscreensaver wich is compiled with GL... However I have all GL applications disabled (I always disable them through xscreensaver-demo), however it doesn't matter. As long as I launch xscreensaver-demo I get FS corruption and system frozen... And if by any reason I get the screen locked (that's the main reason I use xscreensaver) I get the FS corruption and can't do anything... I'm about to get from AUR xautolock, and use xlock with blank screen or matrix, :-) I'll see if can get myself included in the bug report, so I can get updated automatically... Thanks, -- Javier.

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Damjan Georgievski
Javier Vasquez
Thayer Williams
Xavier Chantry