On Sat, Aug 02, 2008 at 08:09:41PM +0200, M. Feenstra wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I use a small device (Alix 1C based) running flashboot (OpenBSD 4.3) as
> my home Bacula backup server. The entire system is running in RAM
> (flashboot does that for me) except of course for the backup storage
> which is a 500G USB drive.
>
> Today I had an power issue causing the system to go down uncleanly. At
> boot it would not mount the USB drive anymore reporting I should run
> "fsck".
>
> This was ofcourse no surprise and I tried running fsck. But it frooze my
> device:
> ----------------------------------------------
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# fsck -v /dev/sd0a
>
>
>
> start /dev/sd0a wait fsck_ffs /dev/rsd0a
> ** /dev/rsd0a
> ----------------------------------------------
>
> and that is it. Nothing more is happening.
>
> If I attach the USB drive to the OpenBSD system I used to build the
> flashboot I have no troubles fsck'ing the disk.
>
> What surprices me is that is hangs the whole system. I can not login,
> reboot, access the kernel debugger or anything. I can only unplug the
> power and reboot after issueing this command.
>
> Is this caused because the system has no enough memory or am I missing
> something obvious here?
fscking a large filesystem consumes lots of memory. If your setup has
too little or no swap this can happen. You are overallocating. Now
ideally a system should do something sensible when trying to allocate
more memory than available swap, but I guess this is a pretty hairy
subject.
-Otto
