Re: rsync to ext2 filesystem issues

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

While it is possible that the ext2 file system implementation in NetBSD
has bugs, it is also possible that the underlying hardware driver has
trouble.

The ext2 code is exercised by the regular ATF tests, so part of all automtic
test runs that we do - however, those are not on bare metall with full
speed and high IO load.

So separating hardware driver/IO load and ext2 bugs would be a first step.

If you could reproduce the problem with rsync from/to a ext2 filesystem
on a regulard disk (or SSD) say on an ahcisata connected disk or
NVMe ld device that would be a big pointer at issues in the file system
code and time to file a PR with reproduction instructions.

If this originally happened on a USB disk, we need more info  (like
full dmesg) and probably you want to enable USB debugging and check
that once it stalls. On a USB disk you should be able trigger the
same effect with some random file system performance test.

A third issue could be that rsync has networking trouble (like lost packets
repeated forever due to network interface bugs or some misconfiguration).
To exclude this, doing the rsync tests locally would be a good idea.

Martin