Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 19 Mar 2001 20:46:59 +0100 | From | Otto Wyss <> | Subject | Linux should better cope with power failure |
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Lately I had an USB failure, leaving me without any access to my system since I only use an USB-keyboard/-mouse. All I could do in that situation was switching power off and on after a few minutes of inactivity. From the impression I got during the following startup, I assume Linux (2.4.2, EXT2-filesystem) is not very suited to any power failiure or manually switching it off. Not even if there wasn't any activity going on.
Shouldn't a good system allways try to be on the save side? Shouldn't Linux try to be more fail save? There is currently much work done in getting high performance during high activity but it seems there is no work done at all in getting a save system during low/no activity. I think this is a major drawback and should be addressed as fast as possible. Bringing a system to save state should allway have a high priority.
How could this be accomplished: 1. Flush any dirty cache pages as soon as possible. There may not be any dirty cache after a certain amount of idle time. 2. Keep open files in a state where it doesn't matter if they where improperly closed (if possible). 3. Swap may not contain anything which can't be discarded. Otherwise swap has to be treated as ordinary disk space.
These actions are not filesystem dependant. It might be that certain filesystem cope better with power failiure than others but still it's much better not to have errors instead to fix them.
Don't we tell children never go close to any abyss or doesn't have alpinist a saying "never go to the limits"? So why is this simple rule always broken with computers?
O. Wyss - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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