Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 29 Mar 1998 03:26:36 -0800 (PST) | From | Blu3Viper <> | Subject | Re: Modified floppies can crash Linux (fwd) |
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On Sun, 29 Mar 1998, Ricky Beam wrote: > Part of me wants such things to panic the kernel. I.e. get my attention > _NOW_. This could be any number of problems and may in fact not be an > actually corrupted filesystem (it may have been misread or have been > corrupted beyond the disk) at which point, continuing could case damage > and any number of other unspeakable things to the machine (ok, so most > of them will be in userspace and not quite as serious.)
imho, this SHOULD be done in userland. there isn't anything stopping userland from telling you "NOW" that something is wrong. just about every other OS i can think of returns 'error reading xxx' instead of blowing up the computer.
a corrupted FS is not a reason to crash. it is a reason to halt further interaction with the particular FS until the userland fixes it.
the kernel can continue running quite happily while returning EBROKE to userland programs when they try to access a damaged FS.
even should you do something as take a chainsaw to your drive while it is running, a fault tolerant system should be able to automatically block that drive out while maintaining the rest of the system.
it is my belief that there is nothing short of mass destruction of the hardware that should stop the system from running. if a particular node in the system falls offline due to any reason, the rest of the system should be unnaffected except for accesses to that node.
is there any reason why this approach is bad?
-d
-- to include colors and other non printing characters in a bash prompt, surround the non printing characters with \[ and \] and bash will correctly calculate the line length.
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