Re: Journaling: Surviving or allowing unclean shutdown?

Alex Belits
2001-01-03T17:12:38Z

On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Daniel Phillips wrote:

> I don't doubt that if the 'power switch' method of shutdown becomes
> popular we will discover some applications that have windows where they
> can be hurt by sudden shutdown, even will full filesystem data state
> being preserved. Such applications are arguably broken because they
> will behave badly in the event of accidental shutdown anyway, and we
> should fix them. Well-designed applications are explicitly 'serially
> reuseable', in other words, you can interrupt at any point and start
> again from the beginning with valid and expected results.

I strongly disagree. All valid ways to shut down the system involve
sending SIGTERM to running applications -- only broken ones would
live long enough after that to be killed by subsequent SIGKILL.

A lot of applications always rely on their file i/o being done in some
manner that has atomic (from the application's point of view) operations
other than system calls -- heck, even make(1) does that.

--
Alex

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Excellent.. now give users the option to cut your hair you hippie!
-- Anonymous Coward