DJA wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> Suspend didn't resume properly so I was forced to power off the frozen >> computer. >> >> Booting got stuck on fsck which gave me a heart attack. I recovered >> with a >> Knoppix CD. >> >> Why can't Linux always survive power outages? I would think this is >> common. >> I can't imagine everyone would know to use Knoppix. >> >> I've seen Windows machines that get abused and improperly shutdown all >> the >> time. They always seem to recover. >> >> Chris > > I would expect that whether data is or is not corrupted upon power loss > depends on the file operation (or even memory operation) being executed > at the moment of the interruption, and the atomicity of that operation. > > Under certain conditions, I very much doubt any OS running on a PC is > completely immune from data corruption.
You are correct. One big thing being ignored in this discussion is the notion that the hardware is fully under software control, which it isn't. Consider the cache on the hard drive. One of the boasting points of hard drive manufacturers is the size of the RAM cache for the drive. What isn't specified is how that cache behaves under a power loss. Does it try and write itself to the disk? Does it just dump everything? Even if the operating system has done a perfect job in syncing memory to disk, it still hasn't really been written out until the drive itself flushes its own cache. And you have no control over that. Gus -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
