Re: [gentoo-user] power button to shutdown for openrc? [SOLVED]

[Mick]

On Sunday, 17 November 2019 10:30:49 GMT Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Nov 2019 11:21:18 +0100, n952162 wrote:
> > (in fact, that's exactly the situation that I've been confronted with
> > and have turned to this mailing list to help me with: X locked up, my
> > power-button was unresponsive so I had to force it down (holding the
> > power key down for 30 seconds), and on reboot TWO filesystems had to be
> > rebuilt by fsck, with substantial loss of organization and of data
> > (despite both being ext3/4 journaling filesystems - I just don't
> > understand that!) )

As has been mentioned before holding the power button down until the system 
powers off is equal to a hard shutdown.  No write caches are flushed, no data 
is synced to disk and any writes could be left in mid air resulting in a 
messed up fs.  I always boot with a LiveUSB/CD and perform a fsck without 
mounting any drives, before I will try to boot the system normally again.

If you lose power while the system is idle and no write operations are in 
process/waiting, then you may well have no loss of data as a result.


> Please don't top-post on this list.
>
> Magic SysReq would probably have helped in those situations. ext3/4 only
> journal metadata by default, you can specify a mount option to also
> journal data but it impacts performance.

When X hangs and I lose the keyboard to the extent where neither Ctrl+Alt+F1, 
or Ctrl+Alt+Del would work, I will use ssh to connect remotely and stop the 
hanging process or restat the X server.  If ssh is also not working, I use the 
magic SysReq sequence to stop processes, sync the disks and reboot, or 
shutdown.  I don't recall losing data in such cases, although when I have time 
I run fsck with Live media just in case.
-- 
Regards,

Mick