I'm using Fedora Core 2 on an old Athalon-K6 box with 128MB of RAM.

I'm running a pretty CPU/Memory intensive command-line ImageMagick
command on it, and almost every time it stops and I get the error:

kernel: journal_get_undo_access: No memory for committed data

And from that point the hda2, the root drive, becomes read-only.

[root@fileserve root]# touch /tmp/test
touch: cannot touch `/tmp/test': Read-only file system

What happened?
I did a search for the kernel error and all I get is three articles
with some C code, probably the code from the kernel that I think
displays the error. Way over my head.

If I reboot, it finds error during an fsck, and then finishes booting
up without any evident problems...until I run ImageMagick's "montage"
command. (The actualy application I think is beside the point.)

My question is, I guess, is there a way to keep this from happening?
What IS happening? And is there a way to recover without having to
reboot and fsck?

Thanks!
Liam

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LRW wrote:

> kernel: journal_get_undo_access: No memory for committed data
>

I dunno' specifically but I'd suggest you read
the ext3 file system FAQ.  A google should find
it.  My guess is, once it can't journal the file
system, it marks it read-only to keep it from
getting corrupted(it can no longer journal disk
writes so it can't allow them.)

ext3 is basically ext2 with journaling and you can switch
back and forth pretty easily.  So you could try converting
it to ext2 and see if all is well.  Could be an ext3 bug.

Post what you find out(unless someone else has encountered
that error and saves you the trouble that is.) 

--

"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."
Woody Allen

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