The software described in this documentation is either in Extended Support or Sustaining Support. See https://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/enterprise-linux-support-policies-069172.pdf for more information.
Oracle recommends that you upgrade the software described by this documentation as soon as possible.
On virtualized systems that are built on Xen version 3, including all releases of Oracle VM 2 including 2.2.2 and 2.2.3, disk synchronization requests for ext3 and ext4 file systems result in journal corruption with kernel messages similar to the following being logged:
blkfront: barrier: empty write xvda op failed blkfront: xvda: barrier or flush: disabled
In addition, journal failures such as the following might be reported:
Aborting journal on device xvda1
The workaround is to add the mount option barrier=0 to all ext3 and ext4 file systems in the guest VM before upgrading to UEK R3. For example, you would change a mount entry such as:
UUID=4e4287b1-87dc-47a8-b69a-075c7579eaf1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
so that it reads:
UUID=4e4287b1-87dc-47a8-b69a-075c7579eaf1 / ext3 defaults,barrier=0 1 1
This issue does not apply to Xen 4 based systems, such as Oracle VM 3. (Bug ID 17310816, 17313428)