[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old machines in use

[Phil Stracchino]

On 05/07/10 12:19, Jonathan Patschke wrote:
> On Fri, 7 May 2010, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>> Yeah, that's actually the other negative that I'd heard for XFS: reports
>> seem to agree that it *really* does not handle unclean shutdowns
>> anywhere close to gracefully.
> 
> About the time SGI started shipping XFS as the primary filesystem for
> IRIX, they beefed up the capacitors in the power supplies and added a
> closely-coupled hardware/kernel feature wherein the power supply would
> signal a pin upon external loss of power.  The kernel handler for that
> interrupt would dedicate all remaining CPU time to making XFS consistent
> enough on-disk to survive the experience.

You know ...  it's a really clever technical feature, but I can't escape
the feeling that it's pretty much an admission in hardware that your
filesystem isn't really stable enough for production use.

The absence of that feature probably accounts for much of the various
reports of XFS fragility on Linux, where the special hardware and the
kernel hook aren't present.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.