On Sunday 16 September 2001 08:40 pm, Alan Cox wrote:
> > My issue, though, is Linux did not handle it well. Userspace actually
> > has an 'EIO' error code for this situation but, instead, any program
> > touching the mounted partition hung in a D state.
>
> Thats a reiserfs property and one you'll find in pretty much any other
> fs.
Is that the best approach? Userspace doesn't always handle EIO well, but
it can't do much worse than a permanent deadlock.
> > Is it possible for the kernel to handle this with enough grace that
> > you can kill the processes and unmount the partition? (Thus allowing
> > the box to continue in a hobbled, but function manner.) Failing that,
> > is it possible for the kernel to handle it well enough for 'shutdown'
> > to cleanly shutdown the box?
>
> Killing the process isnt neccessary, its been halted in its tracks. As
> to a clean shutdown - no chance. You've just hit a disk failure, the on
> disk state is not precisely known, writes have been lost. Nothing is
> going to make a clean shutdown possible under such circumstances.
Let me rephrase: cleanish. At least enough to let 'shutdown' actually
shutdown and surviving filesystems to unmount cleanly. I guess this would
require all file ops to that filesystem to return EIO and umount would
drop the filesystem as-is.
-- Brian
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Sep 23 2001 - 21:00:18 EST