Description of problem: If you install openoffice (at least the combination of -writer, -calc, and -impress; I have not tried with a more minimal package set) at some point during the installation the system will hang with ext3 errors in dmesg. How reproducible: 100%. Seems to hang at slightly different places if I have installed slightly different package sets, suggesting that this has to do with the system running out of space. Steps to Reproduce: 1. boot liveUSB key 2. begin installation of openoffice.org-{writer,calc,impress} (either with yum or pirut) 3. do 'watch 'dmesg | tail'' in a terminal 4. after the packages finish downloading, while the packages are installing, watch the terminal fill with ext3 error messages before the system becomes unresponsive. Expected results: Doesn't die. :) Additional info: Have reproduced with F8 test1, test2, and now rawhide livecd iso from 10-19. liveusb was created with livecd-iso-to-disk; I have not tried it with an actual liveCD as I don't have access to a CD drive on this machine.
This is caused as we use memory as the backing store for changes to the live system. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good way to really detect (to avoid or warn)... longer term, we want to be able to have the changes persist with backing on disk which would help with the problem.
Not a huge deal; sort of an edge case, obviously. Thought it was worth recording, though, in case it was an easy fix.
I'm hitting this on the RTM version of FC9 as well. I'm using a 250MB overlay and it appears that once this space is used, I hit this bug as well. This renders my usb flash drive unbootable and is easy to repro. Are there any suggestions on how to either avoid this (besides the obvious dont use all the overlay) or recover the flash drive? There should be a mechanism to save a user from bricking the flash drive by running out of space. If it would help, I can provide log files, ect. Please contact me if this would help.
*** Bug 443475 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
For Fedora 10, I definitely want to get some sort of "view" into what the available free space in the overlay looks like as well as give more intelligent indicators of things going bad.
(For my own remembering as much as anything) We can get information on how much of the overlay is used with 'dmsetup status live-rw', the fourth field gives us UsedBlocks/TotalBlocks So some thoughts on what we could do * Poll at some interval on what the used percentage is. When you get to a certain amount (80%, 90%?), give a notification to the user. Tricky as polling sucks and the polling has to be done as root. * Shrink the rootfs based on the size of the snapshot at boot time. This wouldn't be 100% as snapshot blocks don't get reused, but it might help. But this is a pain as we can't shrink filesystems when they're unmounted * Switch to using the minimal rootfs always and then resize it based on the snapshot size. Same caveats as above, but seems a little more plausible to implement I sort of like the second and third options as then we could just rely on fixing the desktop notification of the problem in general but it still doesn't end up "fully" fixing things due to dm-snapshot not reusing blocks.
*** Bug 450097 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Okay, after a bit of hacking and trying different things, I'm pretty convinced that the only way we can really get to do anything reasonable here is by having something more than dm-snapshot to use as our overlay like, eg, unionfs. If we were able to use unionfs, then we'd just get -ENOSPC when out of space and it would just be a matter of the normal reporting (and checking via statfs64) of that as opposed to trying to deal with the weird cases that dm-snapshot bubbles up Reassigning to kernel for that
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