Block devices in pagecache, fsck, and what's going on...

Hello,
I've noticed very bad problem few weeks ago, but I thought that it
is just some bad accident. But today it happened again.

Say that for some reason kernel will crash (such as missing read_unlock...)
and you have to hard reboot it.

Now you reboot, and system runs e2fsck, which removes couple of
/var/run/*.pid entries.

It was not severe, so initscripts (Debian unstable) remount root read-write,
and continue booting. And now - oops - first cleanup script complains that it could not remove these *.pid files because of -EIO, and shortly after that filesystem is remounted read-only because of "Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 271450112, count=56; block = 32768, count = 2564" and it goes downhill very quickly...

After reboot fsck it says that entries xxx.pid in /var/run has deleted/unused
inode yyy, and if I do not reboot, there is very high chance that it will die again.

If I reboot after running e2fsck, everything is fine. Always.

My question is very simple: is this intended behavior of non-coherent
cache between /dev/hda1 and ext2 layer (which also makes dump to crash), or is it something missing in e2fsck (1.27), or is it Debian bug and it is now required to reboot machine after any run of e2fsck on / partition?
Thanks,
Petr Vandrovec [email protected]

P.S.: BTW, I find it very strange that in /var/log/* I can have
written: "Can't open file /var/cache/samba/browse.dat.. Error was Read-only file system" when /var/log/* lives on same filesystem as /var/cache... and also all remounting-readonly messages are here, written to same partition which was remounted-read only due to these fatal errors.

Hi!

It is not Debian's bug I sometimes get the same problem on highly modified RedHat 7.2 with e2fsck (1.23) (Yes, I know I should upgrade).