Gentoo Archives: gentoo-embedded

From: Ed W <lists@××××××××××.com>
To: gentoo-embedded@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-embedded] crash proofing a system from power cutoffs
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:03:34
Message-Id: 4F1DA968.1060100@wildgooses.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-embedded] crash proofing a system from power cutoffs by Kfir Lavi
1 > I thought of creating 5 200mb paratitions of raid1. So 5 will be
2 > mirrored.
3 > What do you think of this solution?
4
5 I don't think it will help much... Sorry. Partial writes are partial writes
6
7 The main way you can kill flash drives is to power off while they are
8 doing an internal write. On many devices if you do this at the right
9 moment then the flash drive completely disappears and is completely gone
10 (not recoverable as far as I know, never can be used or data accessed
11 ever again...)
12
13 I believe some very new drives has small capacitors to finalise a write
14 if the power goes off suddenly, however, I think on everything else your
15 flash is likely toast... The issue is corruption of the internal flash
16 drive filesystem, NOT the filesystem that you create on top of that (I
17 have one dead flash drive and I think it may well have been killed by
18 this? Allegedly the latest SLC flash drives from PC Engines are somewhat
19 resistant to this problem...)
20
21 With regards to corrupting the user filesystem due to sudden power loss,
22 ie as per normal spinning drives, then yes, any journalling filesystem
23 seems like a good idea. Ext4 is chosen by google (albeit without a
24 journal...). XFS is an odd ball choice and may have massive write
25 amplification problems that I don't know about, but what is nice is that
26 it seems resiliant to corruption on powerloss and avoids a fsck step.
27 This is only "better" in the sense that it doesn't require user input
28 and for embedded, this may keep the device going longer between visits
29 from support... However, bottom line is that if the power goes off
30 during a write then at some point you loose data...
31
32
33 Good luck
34
35 Ed W