Panic during kernel rebuild; file system left inconsistent

[Brett Glass]

At 09:13 PM 12/4/2003, Igor Pokrovsky wrote:

>I've seen the same message about softupdates, but it appeared after unexpected
>power problems, when computer turned off without syncs and umounts.

In this case, it occurred after a crash... which likewise occurred
without a sync or umount. The machine just panicked and rebooted. When
I got to the console, I found it in single-user mode, with fsck complaining
that softupdates hadn't kept things consistent and asking me what to do with 
shards of files whose metadata hadn't been fully committed to disk. After
two fscks, the file system appeared to be fine; all of the files in "lost+found"
were dependency files generated during the kernel build and could be deleted
safely. But the crash unnerved me. If the system is so fragile that it
crashes during a kernel rebuild, how will it react to other stresses?

Since there have been rumblings about problems in the 4-STABLE ata driver,
I wonder if perhaps I should go with pst, twe, or SCSI controllers to
increase stability in systems I build until 5.3 comes out.

--Brett