On the vger.kernel.org outage

This is something of a concern too - would be interesting to know the filesystem used, how it
was configured (e.g. for ext3, was barrier=1 in effect to ensure that data=ordered works
properly with drive-level write-caching), kernel version, etc.

A kernel oops shouldn't cause a very long filesystem recovery, unless perhaps the disks are so
huge that a full fsck takes a very long time.  But then a journalling filesystem should
prevent such long fsck's anyway...