576288 - Bookmarks lost or not accessible after machine crash or hard reset.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 436737

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Torsten Neuer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; de; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100628 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; de; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100628 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.6

When a machine crashes or is hard reset by a user while Firefox is running, all the bookmarks are lost.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Press the <reset> button on the machine when Firefox is running.

Actual Results:  
After reboot, Firefox comes up with an empty bookmarks list.

Expected Results:  
The bookmarks should still be there.

In addition to losing the bookmarks, there may also be some other issues, all which should also be related to the sqlite databases used to store the information inside the personal settings folder.
The behaviour is probably caused by keeping the databases open (thus they are marked as being unclean) while Firefox is running - not only while data is being read or written.
The malicious behaviour first occurred when Firefox started to use sqlite databases for some settings - prior to that change, no data would be lost.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This shouold not happen if your build uses our internal sqlite library, fsyncs should ensure integrity. Is this always reproducible? can you paste your buildconfig from about:buildconfig?

Comment 2

[Torsten Neuer]

Bookmarks are stored in an sqlite database, so I assume that the sqlite library is used. Opening the files in the sqlite command line tool shows that the database has not been closed correctly (It does not matter whether bookmarks were changed or not in order to reproduce the error).
When this error occurs, Firefox will also tell that the file cannot be opened, because "some program is using the file".
The situation can be fixed by deleting the bookmark file and restoring the latest automatic backup generated by Firefox.
The error is at least 100% reproducable when the user data is on NFS, so it might also be an issue with sqlite and nfs.

about:buildconfig

Build platform
target
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Build tools
Compiler 	Version 	Compiler flags
gcc 	gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) 	-Wall -W -Wno-unused -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -W -Wno-long-long -pedantic -g -fno-strict-aliasing -pthread -pipe -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -Os -freorder-blocks -fno-reorder-functions
c++ 	gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) 	-fno-rtti -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Woverloaded-virtual -Wsynth -Wno-ctor-dtor-privacy -Wno-non-virtual-dtor -Wcast-align -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-long-long -pedantic -g -fno-strict-aliasing -fshort-wchar -pthread -pipe -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -Os -freorder-blocks -fno-reorder-functions

Configure arguments
--build=x86_64-linux-gnu --prefix=/usr '--includedir=/usr/include' '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--infodir=/usr/share/info' --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var '--libexecdir=/usr/lib/firefox' --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking --disable-silent-rules --srcdir=. --enable-optimize --enable-ipc --enable-tests --enable-mochitest --disable-system-cairo --disable-system-sqlite --without-system-nspr --without-system-nss --enable-crashreporter --disable-debug --with-user-appdir=.mozilla --without-system-jpeg --without-system-zlib --enable-system-myspell --disable-composer --disable-elf-dynstr-gc --disable-gtktest --disable-install-strip --disable-installer --disable-ldap --disable-mailnews --disable-profilesharing --disable-strip --disable-strip-libs --disable-tests --disable-mochitest --disable-updater --disable-xprint --enable-application=browser --enable-canvas --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk2 --enable-gnomevfs --enable-pango --enable-postscript --enable-svg --enable-mathml --enable-xft --enable-xinerama --enable-extensions=default,-reporter --enable-safe-browsing --enable-single-profile --with-distribution-id=com.ubuntu --enable-startup-notification --enable-official-branding

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

ah, nfs is a complete different story, SQLite has issues when run on nfs.