Problems with ext4 in ubuntu jaunty

    Briefly about the main thing - ext4 in ubuntu jaunty is unstable. Under certain circumstances, which include a relatively small amount of free space - several GB, when you try to delete large files or a large number of files, the system freezes. Deaf freezing, which is called "for reset". There is a corresponding bug report . But it is treatable.

    I, like probably many of those gathered here, licked my lips a long time ago and walked around the new version of the ext - ext4 file system. One of the main reasons that pushed me to switch to ext4 was lags when deleting large files from partitions on ext3. For a long time I was sitting on kubuntu 8.04, but still decided to upgrade. During the update, I saw many wonders and adventures. In order to solve some problems, I rearranged a number of updates, several versions of kde (4.2, 4.2.9, 4.3, followed by a rollback to kde3), as a result I had a decent size archive in / var / cache / apt / archives. Dimensions - under two gigabytes, several hundred files.

    So, the further this directory grew, the more often I began to encounter an unpleasant glitch - a dull freeze when trying to install / update packages in bulk. You can imagine what the system turns into when upgrading from one version of kde to another during which the system freezes.

    Further more. Attempting to execute sudo apt-get clean to clear the cache with a 100% guarantee led to an immediate freeze. Moreover, the manual deletion of these files also ended in a hang.

    After googling, this bug report was discovered, from which it follows that at the moment all the machines based on ubuntu jaunty with the kernel installed by default are affected (currently it is 2.6.28-13-generic).

    There is a cure. From today, there are even two of them:
    1. As follows from the aforementioned bug report, the fix has already been sent to proposed and is already compiling. All you need to do is enable jaunty-proposed updates and wait for the update. It is not known whether this will help, because you still need to get confirmation that this works. UPDATE: As it turned out, this method does not work. The update that did not fix the problem.
    2. The second option is to manually install the new kernel from the 2.6.29 branch, for example from here . The bonus of this method is that a number of graphic chips will work much better.
    The conclusion here is something like this: the kernel used in Jaunty turned out to be somewhat problematic. These are problems with intel cards, and problems with ext4. Using ext4 without installing the appropriate updates is dangerous. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you include the proposed updates, either wait using ext4 or update the kernel.

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