Problems with ext4 in ubuntu jaunty

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

I, as probably many of those who gathered here, licked their lips for a long time and walked around and around the new version of the ext - ext4 file system. One of the main reasons that pushed me to switch to ext4 was to hang 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 have seen 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 sized 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 a nasty glitch — a deadlock when trying to install / update packages on a massive scale. You can imagine what the system turns into when upgrading from one version of kde to another during which the system hangs.
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Further more. Attempting to run sudo apt-get clean to clear the cache with a 100% guarantee resulted in 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 ubuntu jaunty-based machines with the default kernel (at present, 2.6.2-13-13-generic) are subject to the problem.

There is a cure. From today they are even two:

1. As follows from the aforementioned bug report, the fix has already been sent to proposed and is already being compiled. All you need is to turn on the jaunty-proposed update and wait for the update. It is not known if this will help. still need to get confirmation that it works. UPDATE: As it turned out, this method does not work. The update did not fix the problem.
2. The second option is to manually install a new kernel from the 2.6.29 branch, for example, from here . The bonus of this method is that a number of graphics chips will earn much better.

The conclusion here is something like this: the kernel used in Jaunty was somewhat problematic. These are problems with intel cards, and problems with ext4. Using ext4 without installing the appropriate updates is dangerous. Therefore, it is highly recommended to enable the proposed update, either to wait using ext4 or to update the kernel.