Posted by Michael Larabel on October 24, 2012
As a warning for those who are normally quick to upgrade to the latest stable vanilla kernel releases, a serious EXT4 data corruption bug worked its way into the stable Linux 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 kernel series.
Being discussed recently on the Linux kernel mailing list was an "apparent serious progressive ext4 data corruption bug in 3.6.3." Theodore Ts'o was able to successfully bisect the kernel and found the serious bug, which first appeared within the Linux 3.6.2 kernel and was since back-ported to older stable kernels.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTIxNDQ
read this before panicking though.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/23/706It looks like fscking everything will fix it (it'll replay the buggered
journal, mangling the metadata, but then fix up the scrambled metadata
and fix the journal's starting block). So I probably don't need to worry
about latent corruption hiding waiting to pounce. Phew.
I run ext4 file systems on some of my installs but I am not sweating it.