Re:Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”
by __david__ on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @11:30AM
(#15758079)
On the other hand, the mere act of panicking may corrupt data (by virtue of stopping processes). I learned this the hard way when my kernel panicked while I was shrinking a large ext4 volume (the panic was unrelated to the shrinking). It's not just a simple equation like you've claimed.
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Re:Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”
by TickleSteve on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @01:08PM
(#15758967)
A panic should stop the processor dead, no data should be corrected as a result.
Data in flight should not be used if you use transactional I/O and therefore will not be used if a write does not complete.
That's fine in theory, but it didn't stop my disk from being corrupted. If the computer hadn't panicked, my data would still be available.
Re:Linus Torvalds: “Do No Harm”
by TickleSteve on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @07:01PM
(#15761757)
its not theory... your system wasn't designed to be fault-tolerant in that manner.
Systems that matter, are.
The linux kernel needs to work with both tolerant and non-tolerant systems. Saying it needs to work a specific way that completely breaks real world things is completely naive, and exactly what Linus was railing against.