Tuesday, June 30, 2009

My first ext4 dataloss!

I guess it was to be expected. Let's see:

1. Ubuntu Jaunty, kernel 2.6.29. Check.

2. An ext4 single partition (or at least a /home in a ext4 partition). Check.

3. Intel driver, using UXA. Check.

Bonus:

4. In a laptop after several sleep/power-up cycles. Check

5. Trying to save power by powering wireless up/down as needed. Check!!

Result: the laptop froze just as I had checked my last 5 minutes of work into Mercurial and was pushing it to my home server. Hard lockup. No emergency SysReq + Sync possible!! Upon reboot it was as if I had never saved the last 5 minutes of work.

Very interesting. Not much was lost and I could not detect any corruption. So I am kind of optimistic. I'll keep using ext4 for the time being.

I am considering making a fsync button, though!! ^_^

No comments: