2.3.x, FS corruption?

[Helge Hafting]

> I've noticed, when I'm running either plain vanilla 2.3.39 or 2.3.40, upgrading
> a pile of debian packages thru apt (download via ftp, temporary spooling of
> the .deb in /var/apt/cache, then bulk installation of each .deb), the
> apt software stop on an error, due to a corruption of a freshly installed
> package file list (a file containing the full path of each file installed by
> a particular package).
>
A well-known problem for me.  I end up rebuilding the file list form the
deb
dpkg never breaks more than one file at a time, as it stops when
encountering
the first broken one.

I got the impression that "truncate" was broken with a race of some kind
when the new pagecache went into 2.3.x  (2.3.7?)  dpkg doing a upgrade
truncates and rewrites a list file for every package upgraded, which
typically
is a lot of files.  And there are lots of other disk activity while this
goes on.

I have the impression that this is one of the things that will be fixed
before
a 2.4.0 release.  
 
> It may be apt or dpkg which are broken, but the thing is I've never had
> such a corruption with 2.2.x, only 2.3.x

They refused a bug report because of the experimental kernel.  It does
not
happen with 2.2.x kernels.  The choice is simple - run the latest and
greatest
with known bugs, or stable old 2.2.x

Helge Hafting

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