New oleg firmware version

Quote:

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Originally Posted by staticroute

there is a GUID support inside 2.6.22.19 kernel firmware by default, it should work I think.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by !gm

It doesn't depend on the OS alone. The filesystem is imho more important.

ext4 for example supports volumes up to 1 Exbibyte where ext3 supports max 16 Tebibyte per volume...
(yes I really try following IEEE 1541 suggestions :D)

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Good good :p
I'm thinking about using EXT4 for a new drive. With all the backports in oleg it does run nicely:)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

Good good :p
I'm thinking about using EXT4 for a new drive. With all the backports in oleg it does run nicely:)

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yes, but still 2.6 seems to be a lot more buggy than 2.4 branch, at least for me..

without custom configuration of kernel it's useless for me..

Quote:

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Originally Posted by staticroute

yes, but still 2.6 seems to be a lot more buggy than 2.4 branch, at least for me..

without custom configuration of kernel it's useless for me..

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buggy? I prefer the 2.6 kernel a lot over the 2.4 one tbh.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

buggy? I prefer the 2.6 kernel a lot over the 2.4 one tbh.

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may I ask what is your router model?

mine is WL500gP v1

Quote:

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Originally Posted by staticroute

may I ask what is your router model?

mine is WL500gP v1

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RT-N16
I also have a WL-500W as wireless ethernet bridge with 2.6, including some oleg opkg packages:)
I actually noticed wifi improvements for my WL-500W. It's stronger and faster :)

I'm waiting silently waiting for my RT-N66U to get oleg as well (not trying to rush the devs;) )

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

RT-N16
I also have a WL-500W as wireless ethernet bridge with 2.6, including some oleg opkg packages:)
I actually noticed wifi improvements for my WL-500W. It's stronger and faster :)

I'm waiting silently waiting for my RT-N66U to get oleg as well (not trying to rush the devs;) )

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well, RT-N16 is based originally on 2.6 I believe, that's why it works ok, but with wl500gP situation is different, the most stable situation with this router is on 2.4.20 kernel, low CPU load, irq usage etc. But the problem is I can't use it due closed-source wi-fi driver which is only available for 2.6 branch.

I partially solved some issues with SLAB allocator and tuned kernel config a bit, but I think it's still not perfect under load.

For example I'm running few openvpn tunnels on 2.4.20 kernel they were eating 0.20 0.10 maximum load, but on new firmware with 2.6.22.19 0.50,0.35,0.22.

Also there is huge load when you're downloading something from LAN, on default options CPU is reaching 100% load. If I didn't alter kernel config it'd be useless (i can't open any site and can't use anything).

Actually my wl500gP equipped with BCM43222 as I noted before + I flashed WL500W firmware, so it's like yours WL500W.

Regarding opkg I just tried it and I think I'd stick with oleg's optware, just because I'm so used to it and I don't want to break existing packages.

Good news for the people that use OpenVPN!

If you keep an eye out on the changelog of Oleg firmware you might have noticed r4318.
This update finally fixes fastnat to work with applications like OpenVPN. This means everyone should be able to turn on fastnat without any problem!
theMIROn who worked on this issue managed to fix it, and I'd like to thank him for that:)

For the people who don't know what fastnat is: fastnat is a piece of code to speed up the routing between wan and lan (nat).
Even if you have no super speed internet fastnat will save you some cpu load you can use on a whole lot of other things:p
So does it affect the OpenVPN performance? YES!

I did a little benchmark and came back with these results:
fastnat on:
down 8.00
up 6.36
fastnat off:
down 7.83
up 6.20
Results from http

So if you update your firmware to r4318 or later you are good to go.
note: this update is only available in the rt-n firmware with linux kernel 2.6.

So how do you check if you have fastnat enabled?

Code:

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nvram get misc_fastnat_x

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This line should produce the answer "1" (without the quotes).
If it doesn't here is how to turn it on:

Code:

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nvram set misc_fastnat_x=1
nvram commit

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Now reboot your router after this and it should work.
If you wish to turn it off again, just replace the 1 by a 0.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

Good news for the people that use OpenVPN!

If you keep an eye out on the changelog of Oleg firmware you might have noticed r4318.
This update finally fixes fastnat to work with applications like OpenVPN. This means everyone should be able to turn on fastnat without any problem!
theMIROn who worked on this issue managed to fix it, and I'd like to thank him for that:)

For the people who don't know what fastnat is: fastnat is a piece of code to speed up the routing between wan and lan (nat).
Even if you have no super speed internet fastnat will save you some cpu load you can use on a whole lot of other things:p
So does it affect the OpenVPN performance? YES!

I did a little benchmark and came back with these results:
fastnat on:
down 8.00
up 6.36
fastnat off:
down 7.83
up 6.20
Results from http

So if you update your firmware to r4318 or later you are good to go.

So how do you check if you have fastnat enabled?

Code:

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nvram get misc_fastnat_x

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This line should produce the answer "1" (without the quotes).
If it doesn't here is how to turn it on:

Code:

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nvram set misc_fastnat_x=1
nvram commit

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Now reboot your router after this and it should work.
If you wish to turn it off again, just replace the 1 by a 0.

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if i do

Code:

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nvram set misc_fastnat_x=1
nvram commit

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and try to use openvpn everytime I try to connect via openvpn from the NAT router gets a reboot. I have wl500gP on rtn firmware. I believe there is no fast nat support on this router.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by staticroute

if i do

Code:

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nvram set misc_fastnat_x=1
nvram commit

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and try to use openvpn everytime I try to connect via openvpn from the NAT router gets a reboot. I have wl500gP on rtn firmware. I believe there is no fast nat support on this router.

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are you on oleg rt-n firmware r4318 or later?

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Originally Posted by wpte

are you on oleg rt-n firmware r4318 or later?

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didn't try yet 4318 i'm on 4298, but will do later.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by staticroute

didn't try yet 4318 i'm on 4298, but will do later.

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well... that's sort of the point, the patch was added on r4318 :p

Quote:

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Originally Posted by staticroute

didn't try yet 4318 i'm on 4298, but will do later.

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You should read wpte's post correctly! Proper functionality is introduced in r4318. I'm on that version and OpenVPN is working smooth like a charm.
Thanks for that, theMIROn. :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

So how do you check if you have fastnat enabled?

Code:

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nvram get misc_fastnat_x

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This line should produce the answer "1" (without the quotes).

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actually, if nvram get misc_fastnat_x returns 0, it means fastnat is disabled.
all other values (empty, 1, 2, on, enabled, !!!111, etc) mean it's enabled.
su, the proper way to enable it, if was disabled, is

Code:

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nvram unset misc_fastnat_x
nvram commit
reboot

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by theMIROn

actually, if nvram get misc_fastnat_x returns 0, it means fastnat is disabled.
all other values (empty, 1, 2, on, enabled, !!!111, etc) mean it's enabled.
su, the proper way to enable it, if was disabled, is

Code:

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nvram unset misc_fastnat_x
nvram commit
reboot

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That's what I said:p

Quote:

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So how do you check if you have fastnat enabled?
...
This line should produce the answer "1" (without the quotes).

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or am I confused here?:confused::p

I used set instead of unset just to leave the value stored in nvram.
Do you think I should change that to unset then?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

Good news for the people that use OpenVPN!

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In general I like this :)

But I'm not sure how I get into this party mood :D

Actually my OpenVPN instance is running on the gateway-router.

My WL-500gP is running in access-point mode, so fastnat won't give me any performance benefits, if I would run the OpenVPN Service there right? :confused:
What do you think?

OK, fastnat started working since r4318, no more router reboots when openvpn is used with fastnat option.

There seems to be a speed improvement as well when using fastnat over openvpn.

Thanks for this.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by !gm

My WL-500gP is running in access-point mode, so fastnat won't give me any performance benefits, if I would run the OpenVPN Service there right? :confused:
What do you think?

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In AP mode the router works like a switch, so there's no lan-wan routing, just switching which is already fast;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

I used set instead of unset just to leave the value stored in nvram.
Do you think I should change that to unset then?

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if unset - default mode (enabled) should be in use.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by !gm

so fastnat won't give me any performance benefits, if I would run the OpenVPN Service there right?

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fastnat will be active if there's any DNAT/SNAT/MASQUERADE targets

I'm playing around with EXT4 since I'm planning on buying a new 3TB harddisk.
My other harddisk is wearing out a bit so I want to replace it before it breaks down;)

I properly looked into the configuration of the kernel before thinking about going over 3TB.
I've seen UEFI was enabled which should allow the GTP partition system for >2TB disks.
For some reason I could never insmod the EXT4 module though I did insmod the dependencies before trying.
It always reported something about a missing symbol.

I decided to build a firmware with EXT4 build in rather than a module and found out while trying to mount, that one option should be enabled as well.

Quote:

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CONFIG_LBD=y

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This will allow Large Block Devices to work. After applying this as well I found that mounting EXT4 worked fine.:D

Let me bump this:o

Do you guys think it's a good idea to go for a 3TB EXT4 formatted disk?
I'm willing to build myself a special brew firmware with CONFIG_LBD enabled if necessary.

Also I think flashfs is not working on the current firmware. Is the firmware getting bigger again?;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

Do you guys think it's a good idea to go for a 3TB EXT4 formatted disk?
I'm willing to build myself a special brew firmware with CONFIG_LBD enabled if necessary.

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Technically, 3TB disk will work with LBD enabled (there is a success story, in russian) and ext4 support is stable enough (I use ext4 for five months).
But I do not think it's a good idea - to use a high capacity drive on router at low speed. You decide :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MercuryV

Technically, 3TB disk will work with LBD enabled (there is a success story, in russian) and ext4 support is stable enough (I use ext4 for five months).
But I do not think it's a good idea - to use a high capacity drive on router at low speed. You decide :)

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I don't care too much about the speed thing, that'll be allright:p
But tbh, why not enable LBD by default? I mean EFI is enabled by default, to support GPT.
Obviously it adds a little extra size, but not that much imho.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

But tbh, why not enable LBD by default? ... Obviously it adds a little extra size, but not that much imho.

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lly wrote that CPU load is slightly increased too

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MercuryV

lly wrote that CPU load is slightly increased too

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hmm... that's indeed a downside.
I might consider a 2TB disk then... too bad the price/gb is a lot higher for those drives:p

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

I might consider a 2TB disk then... too bad the price/gb is a lot higher for those drives:p

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Can you buy 3TB HDD with a sort of money-back guarantee?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MercuryV

Can you buy 3TB HDD with a sort of money-back guarantee?

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In the Netherlands we have a law for online shopping.
You can return something until 14 days after you received it, no questions asked. You might have to pay refurbishment costs if you scratch it or something though:p
If I want to return it, it's going to take a long long time with dban though:D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

In the Netherlands we have a law for online shopping.
You can return something until 14 days after you received it, no questions asked.

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Then try and share results :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MercuryV

Then try and share results :)

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Still need to wait for it to be in stock again... almost 2 weeks till it is.
I was looking at this bad boy btw: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=240

I'm playing around with EXT4 a bit, and I received this kernel error:

Quote:

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Oct 13 19:10:45 kernel: Call Trace:
Oct 13 19:10:45 kernel: [<80266a18>] dump_stack+0x8/0x34
Oct 13 19:10:45 kernel: [<800a0fc0>] __getblk+0x310/0x320
Oct 13 19:10:45 kernel: [<800a1038>] __bread+0x1c/0x1ac
Oct 13 19:10:45 kernel: [<c02cc434>] ext4_group_desc_csum_verify+0x61c/0x2e18 [ext4]
Oct 13 19:10:45 kernel: EXT4-fs (sdc1): unable to read superblock

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using r4680

I created the partition like this:

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mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/sdb1

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on the router.

I tried to make the ext4 partition with gparted :p
and it uses the command:

Quote:

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mkfs.ext4 -j -O extend -L "" /dev/sdb1

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Also gave me the same error.

Either way the drive shows up at my pc correctly and is usable



edit:
on r4656 it seems to work. I'll try higher revisions tomorrow

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

I'm playing around with EXT4 a bit, and I received this kernel error:


using r4680

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Probably it broken in r4667. Backport can be incomplete :(
Try to remove kernel-2.6/150-fs-ext4-updates7.patch before kernel tree prepare. Please report if it help.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lly

Probably it broken in r4667. Backport can be incomplete :(
Try to remove kernel-2.6/150-fs-ext4-updates7.patch before kernel tree prepare. Please report if it help.

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Yes, with kernel-2.6/150-fs-ext4-updates7.patch removed it seems to work fine.
I've just compiled the modules, and loaded them up.

When I place the modules in /opt/lib/modules/2.6.22.19 it even automatically modprobes them, nice :)
I did unload the old modules by rmmod ext4, crc16 and jbd2.

I must say I like ext4 on the router so far. It seems to give a better performance in big file and directory situations. In ext3 it takes a long time to even list the files for some reason.
Also I was able to get about 0.5MB/s extra speed trough samba.

Eventually I want to move my /opt partition onto a ssd (with mlc memory) to save some energy and make my harddisk live a bit longer.

So I've bought a 4TB harddrive: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=870
I formatted it with EXT4 under linux mint 13 with kernel 3.5.3 with gparted. I rounded the sizes to MiB.
When I plugged it in my RT-N16 it was just plug and play, it instantly worked:D

now I just need to wait for my 950GB to transfer to my new drive :p

I've transferred over 400GB already, but I did noticed some hiccups.
EXT4 seems to work well overall, good performance etc.
But after a while (seems almost random) I get a segmentation fault in cp, the drive becomes inaccessible and the router is not able to umount it, even when the drive is removed.
I don't see any oops, maybe I should turn extra debugging on?
The router is also not able to reboot after the segfault.

I'm using r4695 btw.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

I've transferred over 400GB already, but I did noticed some hiccups.
EXT4 seems to work well overall, good performance etc.
But after a while (seems almost random) I get a segmentation fault in cp, the drive becomes inaccessible and the router is not able to umount it, even when the drive is removed.
I don't see any oops, maybe I should turn extra debugging on?
The router is also not able to reboot after the segfault.

I'm using r4695 btw.

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Only debugging can help. Did you try the same on regular Linux workstation or Windows?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by staticroute

Only debugging can help. Did you try the same on regular Linux workstation or Windows?

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Yes I did a full check (sector by sector) of the drive before I dumped all my data on it;)
I'm copying again, and I have a bit of a nasty memory leak feeling.
If it's a leak, the leak is probably small because the used memory is increased bit by bit very slowly.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

I've transferred over 400GB already, but I did noticed some hiccups.
EXT4 seems to work well overall, good performance etc.
But after a while (seems almost random) I get a segmentation fault in cp, the drive becomes inaccessible and the router is not able to umount it, even when the drive is removed.
I don't see any oops, maybe I should turn extra debugging on?
The router is also not able to reboot after the segfault.

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In case of you can't reboot, it seems to be kernel problem.
It can be either ext4(jbd2) specific or common writeback/bdi interfaces problem. I never hear that somebody did such stress-test on router, 400Gb is really huge amount of data!

Best of all, if you able to prepare reproducible minimal test-case.
If problem is ext4 specific, than switching to ext3 will help. To enable ext4 debugging you have to recompile ext4.ko, jbd2.ko kernel modules with CONFIG_EXT4_DEBUG=y & CONFIG_JBD2_DEBUG=y

Also, please try r4652 - it is a small chance that I miss something in latest backports.

Anyway, "cp" shouldn't crash silently - please try to use gdb to get type of fault.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lly

In case of you can't reboot, it seems to be kernel problem.
It can be either ext4(jbd2) specific or common writeback/bdi interfaces problem. I never hear that somebody did such stress-test on router, 400Gb is really huge amount of data!

Best of all, if you able to prepare reproducible minimal test-case.
If problem is ext4 specific, than switching to ext3 will help. To enable ext4 debugging you have to recompile ext4.ko, jbd2.ko kernel modules with CONFIG_EXT4_DEBUG=y & CONFIG_JBD2_DEBUG=y

Also, please try r4652 - it is a small chance that I miss something in latest backports.

Anyway, "cp" shouldn't crash silently - please try to use gdb to get type of fault.

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pff 400gig is nothing:p
But that's a total I copied. First I copied about 70GB when cp crashed, then after a hard-reboot I copied the rest without any problem.
I didn't found any corruption of the filesystem btw.

I remember that I had an incident with an other drive as well (a test ext4 drive). It was just spun down for a long time, it worked for days but then I wasn't able to umount or access it. I'm not sure if this is a stress problem.

I will run the cp command with gdb this time, and try the latest revision;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lly

To enable ext4 debugging you have to recompile ext4.ko, jbd2.ko kernel modules with CONFIG_EXT4_DEBUG=y & CONFIG_JBD2_DEBUG=y

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I get an error when I try that:

Code:

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fs/jbd2/journal.c: In function 'journal_free_journal_head':
fs/jbd2/journal.c:1880:13: error: 'JBD2_POISON_FREE' undeclared (first use in this function)
fs/jbd2/journal.c:1880:13: note: each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in

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I've just set it with make menuconfig in the kernel after all the patches where applied (after gateway directory was created)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wpte

I get an error when I try that:

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Sorry, I must check it myself before to give advice to you. Will fix it ASAP.

Updated: Fixed in r4703

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lly

Sorry, I must check it myself before to give advice to you. Will fix it ASAP.

Updated: Fixed in r4703

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allright, I've loaded up the modules with debugging, and ran cp in gdb.
With gdb this is all I've got:

Code:

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Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
The program no longer exists.

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I've attached the dmesg output. not sure if the debugging option helped that much:
Attachment 9330
2 oops's are logged.

I just noticed I also get quite a bit of IPv6 ICMP spoofing attempts :p