Users are urged to check the integrity of the file systems

May 23, 2015 01:45 GMT  ·  By

The Arch Linux developers informed users today, May 22, about the immediate availability of a critical update for the kernel packages used in the distribution that promises to patch the well-known EXT4 RAID data corruption issue.

Softpedia reported earlier this week that most of the upstream Linux kernel branches were plagued by a data corruption issue caused by delayed and unwritten extents in the EXT4 filesystem, and that several Arch Linux users complained of data loss on RAID setups.

Arch Linux was one of the several distributions affected by the respective data corruption issue that occurred on software RAID 0 arrays with EXT4 file systems mounted with the "discard" option, as it uses Linux kernels from the stable 4.0.x branch, as well as the 3.14.x LTS (Long Term Support) series.

Both Arch Linux's stable kernels were updated on May 22 to Linux kernel 4.0.4 and Linux kernel 3.14.43 LTS, which patch the data corruption problem mentioned above, after numerous users were already affected by the data corruption bug.

"The issue has been addressed in the linux 4.0.4-2 and linux-lts 3.14.43-2 updates. Due to the nature of the bug, however, it is likely that data corruption has already occurred on systems running the aforementioned kernels," says Evangelos Foutras in the announcement.

Arch Linux users are urged to check the integrity of their file systems

Due to the fact that users who used RAID setups have been affected by the EXT4 data corruption issue for more than two weeks now, the Arch Linux developers urge them to verify the integrity of respective file systems using the "fsck" command or restore from a safe backup.

It is strongly advised that all Arch Linux users update their distributions as soon as possible to the new kernel versions pushed on May 22 in the main software repositories of the rolling-release operating system. It is always a good idea to keep your system(s) up to date!