fix: Handle WAL corruption properly on startup (backport release-3.4.x) - #18410
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Signed-off-by: Assel Meher <asselmeher@gmail.com> Co-authored-by: Paul Rogers <129207811+paul1r@users.noreply.github.com> (cherry picked from commit 1954f67)
paul1r
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Jul 10, 2025
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Backport 1954f67 from #18175
What this PR does / why we need it:
Currently a WAL corruption lead to endless restart loops, as reported in issue #12583. Users experience crashes with errors like:
and
This causes loki to crashloop indefinitely, repeatedly reading the WAL and updating object storage, which can be costly for large WALs.
This PR adds the ability to repair the WAL on startup (if possible). It also adds unit tests which corrupt the WAL and try to recover it after.
Notice that we only recover from the corruption at the TSDB WAL level. Any corruption in the data part (invalid chunks or invalid series) is unrecoverable and we just log the error and crash.
It also includes some documentation about the WAL format used for future reference.
The metric
wal_corruptions_repairs_totalis added to track whenever we fail or succeed to repair the corrupted WAL.Which issue(s) this PR fixes:
Fixes #12583
Special notes for your reviewer:
Checklist
CONTRIBUTING.mdguide (required)featPRs are unlikely to be accepted unless a case can be made for the feature actually being a bug fix to existing behavior.docs/sources/setup/upgrade/_index.mddeprecated-config.yamlanddeleted-config.yamlfiles respectively in thetools/deprecated-config-checkerdirectory. Example PR