On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Otto Wyss wrote:
> 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.
What data, if any, did you lose?
While fsck complains loudly when the system comes back up, 9 times in 10
no data is actually lost during a power loss. e2fsck is really good at
recovering damaged filesystems.
> 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.
Mount the filesystem synchronously to accomplish this. It will prevent
the kernel from using a write cache basically. It will ensure that if a
write operation completes, then the data will be physically on the disk
afterward.
> 2. Keep open files in a state where it doesn't matter if they where
> improperly closed (if possible).
The way to do this is to use a highly reliable filesystem, such as ext3fs,
Tux or ReiserFS. These filesystems guarantee that metadata is consistent
at all times.
> 3. Swap may not contain anything which can't be discarded. Otherwise
> swap has to be treated as ordinary disk space.
I can't think of a case where the contents of swap matter in any way for
recovering from a power failure.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 23 2001 - 21:00:12 EST