Bug 466406

Update: finally rebooted (Oracle bombs with too much uptime...) - filesystem fsck's OK, but the dmesg errors persist.  Still on 5.2 on this machine.

You mounting with any special options, or just defaults?  Anything odd happen leading up to this problem?

There are three ext3's mounted 'data=journal', and one 'defaults', but the defaults one is /boot which probably doesn't have any activity on it.

With the caveat that I don't know what I don't know, this appears to be asymptomatic aside from the kernel message.

yes I don't believe this will cause any major issues, but keeping a good backup may be prudent just in case.  How much ram do you have?  Also, is there significant memory pressure when you are seeing these messages?  Or do you see them all the time, regardless of the load on the box?

This machine had 4GB of RAM on the standard 32-bit kernel, and it now has 12GB of RAM on the -PAE kernel.  With 4GB of RAM the machine was hammered, but now I rarely see usage north of 8GB on the munin graphs.  I've seen these under both memory conditions.

It does run a high load average on occasion, usually during nightly backups.  I see I didn't have timestamped kern.* logs on this machine (on now).  I'll see if the next one correlates to anything obvious.

I think I can also get it up to 5.3 in the next week or two.

This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red
Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release.  Product Management has requested
further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential
inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed
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Has updating to 5.4 helped the matter any?

Just to not leave your question hanging, I haven't had a reboot for the 5.4 kernel yet.  I will update when I do.

I still see it with the 5.3 kernel.

Any updates on this?

Created attachment 434507 [details]
egrep '2.6.18|BUG' /var/log/kern.log | uniq -c

Thanks for the reminder.  Still there on 2.6.18-194.3.1.el5PAE:

Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel: BUG: warning at fs/ext3/inode.c:1676/ext3_releasepage() (Tainted: GF    )
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<f887d44a>] ext3_releasepage+0x49/0x67 [ext3]
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<f887d401>] ext3_releasepage+0x0/0x67 [ext3]
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c0475da2>] try_to_release_page+0x34/0x46
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c045d24c>] pagevec_strip+0x2f/0x3f
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c045df08>] shrink_active_list+0x254/0x3e3
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c045ea4a>] shrink_zone+0xde/0x15b
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c045ef09>] kswapd+0x28a/0x3ab
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c04363ff>] autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x2d
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c045ec7f>] kswapd+0x0/0x3ab
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c043633b>] kthread+0xc0/0xed
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c043627b>] kthread+0x0/0xed
Jul  2 23:50:13 affinity kernel:  [<c0405c53>] kernel_thread_helper+0x7/0x10

also, attaching the output of:

  egrep '2.6.18|BUG' /var/log/kern.log | uniq -c

which shows that the occurrence is rather infrequent, but highly clustered when it occurs.

This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 and Red Hat does not plan to fix this issue the currently developed update.

Contact your manager or support representative in case you need to escalate this bug.

This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 and Red Hat does not plan to fix this issue the currently developed update.

Contact your manager or support representative in case you need to escalate this bug.

This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 and Red Hat does not plan to fix this issue the currently developed update.

Contact your manager or support representative in case you need to escalate this bug.

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