Re: My first Linux crash
On Monday 04 November 2002 09:59 am, Rob Weir wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 08:58:07AM -0500, Andrew Perrin wrote:
> > On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Robert Ian Smit wrote:
> > > I was surprised that this issue took down the system on Linux.
> > > I understand, as nate explained, that hardware errors will always
> > > result in trouble but I expected the kernel to react differently.
> > > (Or is this a limitation of x86 or the issue you mention?)
> >
> > FWIW, I'm skeptical of Nate's claim that excessive I/O errors must bring
> > down the system. I'm certainly not a kernel hacker, but I see no reason
> > why the kernel couldn't do what it does in other roughly analogous
> > situations: decide that the stream is bad and effectively turn it off,
> > either by killing the process or by redirecting the stream to /dev/null
> > or something like that. The whole point of a robust, threaded,
> > multitasking architecture is supposed to be that isolated errors *don't*
> > bring down the system.
>
> I don't think nate was refering to the literal text stream of errors. I
> would imagine that hardware problems could get the controller chips into
> such a state of confusion that a power cycle is required, which would
> mean rebooting the entire system.
>
================================
When ripping sound tracks from CD, then encoding them into mp3 format, my
system crashes. Well, that was under several different Mandrake
distributions. I don't understand how come it sometimes totally freezes up
the entire system. Knocking down the X server doesn't work - system totally
frozen. I thought operating system was separate from applications, and this
"shouldn't* happen. I haven't tried it now that I'm using Debian 3.0 (Woody).
Reply to: