Gordon Messmer wrote:
I opened bug 494927 with Red Hat after seeing this kernel error on two different hosts, just a few days after updating or installing CentOS 5.3: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=494927
In an attempt to confirm this bug, I set up a system under KVM and started three loops to generate filesystem activity. I ran bonnie++ as two different users in separate directories under /var/tmp, and an additional loop copying /usr to a directory under /var/tmp and then removing it. The /var filesystem became corrupt relatively quickly.
I'm now nearly certain that there is a severe filesystem corruption bug in 2.6.18-128.1.6.el5. Please, if you are running this kernel, reboot your systems into single user mode and check your filesystems with "fsck -f". Your filesystems may appear clean despite corruption. My test system exhibited this behavior. Even though the corruption should have been obvious (files could not be deleted), the FS was marked clean.