[Debconf-devel] Bug#764542: debconf: potential filesystem corruption

[westlake]

Package: debconf
Version: 1.5.49
Severity: important

when there's low ram available and dpkg-reconfigure is issued (eg, 
dpkg-reconfigure locales), if there are premature "exits" when building 
locales it could lead to a filesystem corruption.

This happened to me more than once where I was using a 128MB ram for 
kvm, and there was less than 64 megs of ram available for 
dpkg-reconfigure..

I wouldn't expect filesystem corruption but there was something of it as 
I was forced to use fsck on boot-up.

There is a filesystem issue, I didn't want to believe it until it 
happened twice with two separate kvm VMs.  The disks are "virtual" 
isolating the diagnosis it could be a potential hardware problem. It 
could also be replicated more than once.

Steps
->dpkg-reconfigure locales would run but would have crash-exits when 
when trying to generate locales.

->type "reboot". On the next boot-up there would be complaint of 
filesystem integrity and fsck would run.

^ These two steps was tried on two different kvms but with the same 
Debian, and same amount of ram reservation.

(Note: the "free" ram available is less than 64 MB, locales tried were 
en_CA.UTF-8 and en_US.UTF-8)

If more logging data is needed, I can try to see if I can do that.
thanks