[5467] in Release_7.7_team
Sun AFS cache problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert A Basch)
Wed May 17 19:05:40 2006
Message-Id: <200605172305.k4HN5VRV022366@anhedonia.mit.edu>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 19:05:31 -0400
From: Robert A Basch <rbasch@MIT.EDU>
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From discussions with Lou, and after making a house call on a couple
of broken machines, it seems that the AFS cache consistency problem
that we dealt with recently on Linux is now affecting Suns in large
numbers. (This is the problem where the machine fails to boot up
due to the filesystem check failing). At this point, it is not clear
whether there might be a software problem triggering the lossage.
I plan to work on a change similar to what we did for Linux, i.e.
to change the cache partition not to be mounted automatically at
boot time, and check and (if necessary) recreate the filesystem
in the AFS startup script before mounting. Unfortunately, this
is tricky on Suns, because machines installed before Athena 9.3
have /usr/vice/etc on this partition as well. So, for now at
least, I propose to handle only the case where the machine has
the new filesystem layout, i.e. where the mountpoint is
/usr/vice/cache, in this way. For machines with the older
layout, probably the only viable option would be to change them
to use the new layout, but that would be tricky (requiring
hacking the update system and booting into the miniroot), and
possibly not be worth the effort.
Bob
