[arch-general] Xscreensaver corrupts ext4 / partition

Javier Vasquez j.e.vasquez.v at gmail.com
Mon Jan 25 11:40:24 EST 2010


On 1/25/10, Thayer Williams <thayerw at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Javier Vasquez <j.e.vasquez.v at 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.


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