[plug] A story

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-12-31 at 08:35, William Kenworthy wrote:

> I am very UN-impressed with ext3, having had continual problems with
> corruptions and minor data loss (laptops do lose power, and when running
> bleeding edge do lockup occasionally)

You WILL lose data with ext3 or reiserfs if you cut power while there
are writes pending. You should not have filesystem corruption, however -
that's what the journaling is for. If you can accept the write speed hit
and really want to be able to power off your laptop at any moment (and
if it actually works properly now) try data=journal mode in ext3.

Personally, I've never had FS corruption on ext3 or reiserfs except in
the case of a verifiable disk failure. I've had a few rare cases of
writes not making it to disk due to sudden battery exhaustion, but now
that I have my laptop's power management behaving properly that doesn't
happen any more.

One possibility may be that the VMWare kernel module isn't coping too
well with Gentoo's kernel. Is it built with preemption enabled or
something like that?

--
Craig Ringer