Re: Induced crashes

[neal@cs.uml.edu (Neal H. Walfield)]

> ext2fs should be quite robust: Even pulling the plug at any time should not
> corrupt the filesystem beyond what e2fsck can repair.

Let us assume that ext2fs writes a block of metadata to disk.  In the
kernel, in the middle of the DMA operation, the kernel panics.  There
is no guarantee that e2fsck will be able to handle this case.

In other words, although a write operation may appear atomic to
ext2fs, in the kernel, that operation is composed of many smaller
atomic operations (with respect to the hardware) during any of which,
the kernel may crash.