On 03/08/2013 03:39 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
On 3/6/2013 5:12 PM, Ric Wheeler wrote:
We actually test brutal "Power off" for xfs, ext4 and other file
systems. If your storage is configured properly and you have barriers
enabled, they all pass without corruption.
Something that none of us mentioned WRT write barriers is that while the
filesystem structure may avoid corruption when the power is cut, files
may still be corrupted, in conditions such as any/all of these:
1. unwritten data still in buffer cache
This is true only for user data, not the file system metadata. We should always
be able to drop power without seeing corruption (like the garbled ls output).
2. drive caches are enabled
Write barriers will take care of drives with write cache enabled, as long as the
hardware RAID card is not in the middle and misleading us.
3. BBWC not working properly
This should not be a worry. If the battery (or in more modern cards, flash
backed) is not working, a good card will flip into write through caching. Should
be slow, but safe.
Note that the write cache state on the drives is still a question mark - that
needs to be disabled normally.
If the techs are determined to hard cut power because they don't have
the time or the knowledge to do a clean shutdown, it may be well worth
your time/effort to write a script and teach the field techs to execute
it, before flipping the master switch. Your simple script would run as
root, or you'd need to do some sudo foo within, and would contain
something like:
#! /bin/sh
sync
echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
echo "Ready for power down."
This will flush pending writes in buffer cache to disk, and assumes of
course that drive caches are disabled, and/or that BBWC, if present, is
functioning properly. It also assumes no applications are still
actively writing files, in which case you're screwed regardless. It's
not a perfect solution and there's no guarantee you won't suffer file
corruption, but this greatly increases your odds against it.
For file system *metadata* consistency, you should not have to do this ever if
the stack is properly configured. The application data will still be lost.
Also, if there are active writers, this is inherently racy. A better script
would unmount the file systems :)
Ric
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