XFS and Power Failures [Was: Linux filesystems]

[Volkan YAZICI <yazicivo@ttmail.com>]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2010, Volkan YAZICI <yazicivo@ttmail.com> writes:
> On Tue, 27 Jul 2010, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> writes:
>> What write operations were you performing at the time you pulled the plug?
>> Unless you were writing the superblock it'd be almost impossible to hose the
>> filesystem to the point it couldn't mount.  Were you doing a resize operation
>> when you pulled the plug?  xfs_growfs?  As far as recovery, it's automatic
>> upon mounting the XFS filesystem.  What do you mean, precisely, by "couldn't
>> *recover* the / fs"?
>
> Vanilla XFS with noatime,notail like basic mount options. The test was
> simple, I was just typing "SELECT 1" from a psql command line (this
> query shouldn't even hit to disk, it just basically returns 1) and
> unplugged machine. At boot, I dropped to fsck command line. At command
> prompt, I manually fiddled around with fsck of xfs to recover the
> unmounted / filesystem, but had no luck. (I also tried recommendations
> and informative messages supplied by manpages and command
> outputs/warnings.) Also if you would Google, it shouldn't be hard to
> spot similar experiences from other people.

Another scenario, same failure. I have a squeeze installed notebook and
having troubles with X. It crashes for some driver specific reasons and
I need to hard-reset the notebook. 1-2 times I found WindowMaker missing
its workspaces, and I didn't have time to inspect the problem. Now I
lost all of my Opera bookmarks (~500 collected in years). Thanks XFS,
but no, you're not power-failure. (BTW, I "kill -9"ed Opera many times,
and it restored all of its settings properly. I don't think it is an
Opera or WindowMaker related bug.)


Regards.