On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 3:27 AM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > Neil Bothwick wrote: >> On Sat, 04 Apr 2015 14:41:12 +0200, lee wrote: >> >>>> On Linux now there's the Magic SysRq Key feature for that. >>> I always can't remember which keys to press with that, so I have it >>> disabled. >> BUSIER backwards. >> >>> And when the keyboard is unresponsive, it won't work. >> It usually does. The kernel sees the Magic key events directly, so even >> if your X server has crashed, it will still respond to Alt-SysReq. >> >> > > I used that on a few puters. I don't recall this ever not working. X > may not see the keyboard but the kernel does. It's a life saver at > times too. At least you can sync and unmount cleanly. >
If you're dealing with a kernel panic of some kind (which you inevitably are when you are doing this sort of thing), all bets are off. I'll agree that usually the magic sysrq works. However, there are certainly going to be cases where it doesn't, or at least where parts of it don't work. In my case the part that usually fails for me right now is btrfs, so unmounting won't work anyway (though I guess it will take care of the ext4 backup partition that is only rarely touched anyway). -- Rich
