Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:13:41 +0200 | From | Tomasz Chmielewski <> | Subject | Re: Ext4 and the "30 second window of death" |
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>> The replace-via-truncate and replace-via-rename workarounds are there >> for the benefit of KDE, and GNOME, which in some configurations >> apparently will replace hundreds of dot files when the desktop is >> started up, for no reason that I can understand. (Not such a great >> idea for SSD write endurance!) Some people apparently spend hours >> making sure that their windows are exactly positioned the way they >> want it when their desktop starts up, and if the system crashes while >> their desktop is starting up, those they could lose their window >> positions, which apparently made a whole bunch of users cranky. In >> practice, most of the editors that I'm familiar with have been around >> for a while, have needed to make sure that that cases such as yours >> wouldn't result in data loss, and so are pretty good about using >> fsync() so that users' files wouldn't be lost, no matter what the >> filesystem or operating system being used. > > Its more than losing window postions. I've been using ext4 with kde 4.2.1 > along with some experimental modules (drm for xorg for r600 support, btrfs) > and a few patches. As expected this has caused a few crashes. I have had > kde lose desktop setup info (eg. it forgot it was using xrender accel). I > have also had kmail lose all its configuration - which is a pita to rebuild. > Note that these crashes occur long after kde has been started...
I've lost contents of my /etc/shadow file some time ago. Great fun after reboot.
But it also means that the problem begins not with KDE and Gnome, but much, much earlier.
-- Tomasz Chmielewski http://wpkg.org
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