Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
btrfs-progs: docs: update memory related problems
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
Inspired by https://www.reddit.com/r/btrfs/comments/1bkdewb/btrfs_errors_in_dmesg/ .

[ci skip]

Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
  • Loading branch information
kdave committed Mar 25, 2024
1 parent 2c99d80 commit 5cfa61d
Showing 1 changed file with 15 additions and 0 deletions.
15 changes: 15 additions & 0 deletions Documentation/ch-hardware-considerations.rst
Expand Up @@ -118,9 +118,21 @@ have been demonstrated (*rowhammer*) achieving specific bits to be flipped.
While these were targeted, this shows that a series of reads or writes can
affect unrelated parts of memory.

Block group profiles with redundancy (like RAID1) will not protect against
memory errors as the blocks are first stored in memory before they are written
to the devices from the same source.

A filesystem mounted read-only will not affect the underlying block device in
almost 100% (with highly unlikely exceptions). The exception is a tree-log that
needs to be replayed during mount (and before the read-only mount takes place),
working memory is needed for that and that can be affected by bit flips.
There's a theoretical case where bit flip changes the filesystem status from
read-only to read-write.

Further reading:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer
* memory overclocking, XMP, potential risks

What to do:

Expand All @@ -129,6 +141,9 @@ What to do:
* memory errors may appear as filesystem going read-only due to "pre write"
check, that verify meta data before they get written but fail some basic
consistency checks
* newly built systems should be tested before being put to production use,
ideally start a IO/CPU load that will be run on such system later; namely
systems that will utilize overclocking or special performance features

Direct memory access (DMA)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Expand Down

0 comments on commit 5cfa61d

Please sign in to comment.