The FC10 ext2 experiment has ended -- don't try this
Robert Moskowitz
rgm at htt-consult.com
Wed Mar 18 18:28:42 UTC 2009
Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>> This is on an ASUS Eee PC netbook with 512Mb memory and a 4Gb SSD and
>> a 8Gb SD card for more disk capacity (4Gb is simply not enough to
>> even install FC10).
>>
>> Only /home was on an ext3 partition. /boot, /, and /var were all ext2
>> partitions.
>>
>> And things had been running well for a month or so. Regularly on cold
>> boot, it would do an auto check on one of the ext2 partitions and
>> reboot. Looked good....
>>
>> Last night I suspended the box while plugged into AC; this worked
>> well and it came right out of suspension this morning (on battery I
>> use hibernate to save the battery). I then did a yum update.
>>
>> The yum update was taking some time and the screensaver kicked in.
>> For some reason this triggered the box to go into suspension (it
>> never went into hibernation when I hibernated then yum update). I
>> 'knew' bad things were going to happen to suspend right in the middle
>> of a yum update...
>>
> You might look at your screensaver settings WRT power saving, you may
> have shot yourself in that foot.
I **thought** I had it set right. I suspect that because my last
operation was a suspend, when it came out of suspend, something was left
so when the timer kicked off (I had it set for 20min) for keyb/mouse
inactivity, it suspended again instead of just going into screensaver.
Of course system the system was hosed, there was no way to find out, and
I don't think I want to try again!
> Using ext3 is hard on battery life.
I know. Even with noatime, you still have more disk activities. Of
course, since my 'drives' are SSD and SD, this might not be such a
difference (ext2 power usage vs ext3).
> Also note there have been recent discussions of ext4 behavior if you
> shut down hard after writing and before the timer has physically
> written your data. I don't have details here, so I don't want to
> spread FUD, but a kernel patch was discussed, and the behavior as
> described does sound somewhat dangerous for laptop operation.
>
> Okay, the URL was in my history, make you own evaluation:
> http://www.h-online.com/open/Possible-data-loss-in-Ext4--/news/112821
>
> I'm not going to depend on prayer to save my data until 2.6.30 is out
> and the fix is tested, not do I agree with Ted T'so that the
> applications should be fixed.
Is Ted on this list? I did not catch his ID. We worked together in the
IETF 10 years ago.
> IMHO any sequence of legal system calls should not zero out the files
> written..., certainly rewriting a block in a file is a pretty normal
> database operation, and should work at least as well as ext3.
>> Sure enough, inodes broken all over the place. Could NOT recover.
>> Fortunately, there was nothing lost other than time.
>>
>> I am rebuilding the system right now. I am keeping the partitions as
>> I had them, but they will all be ext3 and I will change fstab for
>> noatime...
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