Hello all,

I recently upgraded to Kubuntu 9.04 and converted my drives to EXT4 drives. Is anyone else using EXT4 in here?

When building KDE from svn with the kdesvn-build script my computer seems to be crashing from time to time. It always happens when it's installing the files from qt-copy while downloading files from the repository. My system completely hangs up, mouse doesn't move or anything. It never happens on normal use.

When i reboot, it says something about recovering inodes. But for some reason i always get errors of mismatched checksums or i have a bunch of files with a filesize of 0 bytes and kde won't build anymore ofcourse (and some more problems).

Now i would like to ask if someone else ever had any problems like this. I don't want to point my finger to EXT4 yet but it's the only major change since i installed kubuntu.

Greetings

I've been using Ext4 ever since it was marked stable in the Kernel, and I have no complaints here...

I also use Ext4 and too have no real problems with it. But I've read that it could loose some data if not shutdown properly eg. hard-reset...
But only thing that I have to say that it feels faster during boot-up, not that fast during normal use.

i have been using EXT4 for several months, no issues yet.

Primoz wrote:But only thing that I have to say that it feels fster during boot-up, not that fast during normal use.

Does "not that fast during normal use" mean that it feels slower than ext3? Or just that the speed-improvements are more noticeable upon boot?

Kryten2X4B wrote:

Primoz wrote:But only thing that I have to say that it feels fster during boot-up, not that fast during normal use.

Does "not that fast during normal use" mean that it feels slower than ext3? Or just that the speed-improvements are more noticeable upon boot?

During normal use it's generally not very noticeable, but Ext4 is definitely faster. The only time i actually noticed the speedup was when deleting things like old kernel sources - it used to take a few seconds with Ext3, but with Ext4 it's almost instant. Deletes are really fast.

Kryten2X4B wrote:

Primoz wrote:But only thing that I have to say that it feels fster during boot-up, not that fast during normal use.

Does "not that fast during normal use" mean that it feels slower than ext3? Or just that the speed-improvements are more noticeable upon boot?

What Alec said; and also for me it's more noticable during boot up. While using KDE it doesn't feel any faster than with Ext3

So then, it seems that EXT4 probably isn't the one that's causing the crashes. The crash didn't happen any more. Then again i didn't build kde again. Like i said, it never occured to me in normal system usage.

Does anybody have an idea what might have caused the crashes? Or maybe give me some pointers on where i need to start looking?

Pconfig wrote:So then, it seems that EXT4 probably isn't the one that's causing the crashes. The crash didn't happen any more. Then again i didn't build kde again. Like i said, it never occured to me in normal system usage.

Does anybody have an idea what might have caused the crashes? Or maybe give me some pointers on where i need to start looking?

well how could you describe "system crashing", like fatal operating system crash, just X, what kind of logs have you looked through for peculiarities, have you located it down to a specific action that "crashes" the system like compiling a certain package?

vbatts wrote:

Pconfig wrote:So then, it seems that EXT4 probably isn't the one that's causing the crashes. The crash didn't happen any more. Then again i didn't build kde again. Like i said, it never occured to me in normal system usage.

Does anybody have an idea what might have caused the crashes? Or maybe give me some pointers on where i need to start looking?

well how could you describe "system crashing", like fatal operating system crash, just X, what kind of logs have you looked through for peculiarities, have you located it down to a specific action that "crashes" the system like compiling a certain package?

Well, the system completely hangs up. I can't do anything anymore. (The caps-lock light is not blinking, so no kernel panic?) Ctrl+alt+backspace doesn't work.

If i remember correctly those crashes always happened while compiling - installing qt-copy. I haven't dug deep in the logs yet. I'll take a good look at them when it happens again. (There's so many of them though )

Pconfig wrote:
Well, the system completely hangs up. I can't do anything anymore. (The caps-lock light is not blinking, so no kernel panic?) Ctrl+alt+backspace doesn't work.

well, didn't ubuntu remap the Kill X from crtl+alt+backspace with their release of Jaunty? i thought i had heard reports of that.

Pconfig wrote:If i remember correctly those crashes always happened while compiling - installing qt-copy. I haven't dug deep in the logs yet. I'll take a good look at them when it happens again. (There's so many of them though )

well you could always ssh in from other machine, and tail -f /var/log/messages and see if you see any helpful output, or if when the desktop seems locked up, whether or not the command line is still active.

vbatts wrote:well, didn't ubuntu remap the Kill X from crtl+alt+backspace with their release of Jaunty? i thought i had heard reports of that.

You're right, i didn't even notice that. I guess i didn't have to restart X yet
Anyway, i tried to crash the system again and it did. I didn't read your post in advance so i didn't try loging in from SSH yet but i'm afraid it won't work. ctrl+alt+F2 does nothing. And also, pressing the caps lock button won't turn on the light anymore.

vbatts wrote:well you could always ssh in from other machine, and tail -f /var/log/messages and see if you see any helpful output, or if when the desktop seems locked up, whether or not the command line is still active.

The system log didn't tell me anything useful. Doesn't show anything about a crash. These are the lines i always get when rebooting the system though:

Code: Select all

2009-05-11 00:01:46   thomas-laptop   kernel   [   10.908056] EXT4-fs: delayed allocation enabled
2009-05-11 00:01:46   thomas-laptop   kernel   [   10.908058] EXT4-fs: file extents enabled
2009-05-11 00:01:46   thomas-laptop   kernel   [   10.910410] EXT4-fs: mballoc enabled
2009-05-11 00:01:46   thomas-laptop   kernel   [   10.910412] EXT4-fs: sda3: orphan cleanup on readonly fs
2009-05-11 00:01:46   thomas-laptop   kernel   [   10.910416] ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 107323
2009-05-11 00:01:46   thomas-laptop   kernel   [   10.910475] ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 35097
2009-05-11 00:01:46   thomas-laptop   kernel   [   10.910511] EXT4-fs: sda3: 2 orphan inodes deleted
2009-05-11 00:01:46   thomas-laptop   kernel   [   10.910512] EXT4-fs: recovery complete.
2009-05-11 00:01:46   thomas-laptop   kernel   [   11.224840] EXT4-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.


/bin/dmesg doesn't hold any info from before the crash. I have no clue but as this machine is a laptop i might want to check out the cpu temp when compiling. Never tried it on linux though. I'll keep you posted

Edit:
That was pretty simple I can readout my temps now. It seems to crash every time now. Not only when working on qt-copy. When it crashed, the CPU temp was around 50°C which isn't too hot for a laptop i guess. So that won't be the problem. I'm going to setup a new user now and unleash the kdesvn build script there. Let's see what happens.

Ok so i tried compiling it with another user. No luck, crashed pretty quick.
Then i came back to my original idea, blame EXT4? So i mounted my old EXT3 partition, made a new user with it's home directory on that partition and i had no problems at all anymore :s

I also has problems with ext4 fs. Data transfer speed as low as 1mbps. Ext3 works fine.

I just had a system hangup while surfing on the internet. The symptoms where exactly the same as when i was building kde on my ext4 drive. Note, i never had a hangup anymore after i switched my svn builds to EXT3 again. I really don't have a clue what might cause this trouble.