From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530 Description of problem: Upgraded from RH7.2 to RH7.3 Whenever I execute 'lilo' to update my boot configuration, I get the following error message: "Unexpected dirty buffer encountered at do_get_write_access:597 (16:02 blocknr 0)" System boots OK, so don't know what this message signifies. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): as per distribution How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: execute 'lilo' Actual Results: see above Expected Results: see above Additional info:
This is a message from the kernel
Which kernel is this? There are two possibilities here. The message you are seeing occurs when ext3 sees a particular unexpected situation arise. That can sometimes arise from kernel bugs (which is why we have that warning), but it can also happen when you have code interfering with ext3. I suspect that you are just seeing the latter effect --- it is possible to see this message when some external program tries to access a filesystem buffer which is under ext3 control, and lilo may well be doing exactly that if you are installing the boot record to an ext3 filesystem. In that case, the warning is entirely benign --- it is only there because this situation can sometimes indicate a bug. The reason that this situation results merely in a log message, not a kernel panic, is precisely because there are situations where it can arise legally.
This is RedHat kernel-2.4.18-5 (but ditto 2.4.18-4). Would this somewhat unsettling message go away if I switched to 'grub'?
No, not if you have grub configured to write its boot sector to the same place. Most people put their boot sectors on the disk MBR, though --- I think what's happening is that you're booting via the boot sector at the beginning of a subsidiary partition (eg. /dev/hda1) rather than the full disk itself (/dev/hda), and using the latter form would avoid the message.
Exactly the case. Thank you.