Listing a directory on an NSS volume triggers a system hang or crash

  • 3415966
  • 08-Nov-2007
  • 27-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell Open Enterprise Server (Linux based)
Novell Storage Services (NSS)

Situation

Trying to list certain directories on an NSS volume results in a system hang or crash.
A kernel ERROR:

Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address

is displayed, together with an "Oops" message, refering to an ndsd process.
When the Oops message includes a decoded call trace, that call trace shows the lsa_readlink function to be involved.

Resolution

Status (Last updated: 2007-11-8)

The root cause of this issue has been fixed as of the latest kernel update (patch-11835) which at the time of writing this TID was 2.6.5-7.287.

Prior to installation of a fixed kernel version, some directory entry corruption may have occurred. If assistance is required to clean up the directory entries which used to trigger this problem, please open a service request with Novell Technical Services (referencing this TID).

Additional Information

Sample Oops message, in full:

Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address ff995000
printing eip:
c0183922
*pde = 00005067
Oops: 0000 [#1]
SMP
CPU: 0
EIP: 0060:[] Tainted: PF U
EFLAGS: 00010246 (2.6.5-7.283-smp SLES9_SP3_BRANCH-20061129165553)
EIP is at vfs_readlink+0x32/0x90
eax: 00000000 ebx: ff994000 ecx: ffffefff edx: 00000004
esi: 4f6d9b30 edi: ff995000 ebp: ff994000 esp: ee7e3f04
ds: 007b es: 007b ss: 0068
Process ndsd (pid: 6893, threadinfo=ee7e2000 task=f3f2d990)
Stack: ff994000 ff994001 fb28ca15 00000001 fb2857b7 ff994000 c01910b0 e826fe48
00000004 4f6d9b30 e81b04a8 c2006a20 fb295480 e826fe04 ee7e3f60 00000004
c017f408 ee7e3f58 059b55d9 00000000 00000000 e8534000 00000000 e81b04a8
Call Trace:
[] lsa_readlink+0xc3/0x179 [nsslsa]
[] __update_atime+0x90/0xe0
[] sys_readlink+0x148/0x190
[] sysenter_past_esp+0x52/0x79

This issue is triggered by file entries on the NSS filesystem which are incorrectly flagged as links, possibly as a result of a problematic restore from backup or as a result of a problematic salvage operation.

TID status

This TID was previously published as TID
3661018.