Re: [patch] 2.2.10 buffer patch

Jamie Lokier (lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk)
Thu, 8 Jul 1999 22:40:07 +0200

Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> o kupdate replaces completly update. It's a separate and alone
> kernel daemon. It has no way to be killed and it won't be swapped
> out. We need kupdate mainly if the machine goes OOM. Think if
> update gets killed (and it's really easy to kill update
> with some trashing proggy). At this point the admin may have not
> a keyboard on the machine. It may stop logging in from the
> network and he chooses to reboot the machine. Woops, update
> is been killed and he will get some more fun at the next
> fsck...

I've never had update die on me to my knowledge.
But, I do know the consequences of not running update.
They are very bad, much worse than minor corruption.

I removed update when I ran the 2.2.x kernel which claimed it wasn't
necessary. I forget to put it back when I upgraded and it was required
again.

This was very bad: I lost a lot of files simply because they never got
written to disk. And fsck didn't show many errors. (In at least one
case, no errors at all).

IMO fsck silently succeeding but me losing several days of files is
pretty bad.

-- Jamie

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