I couldn't agree more. I yearn for the days when the OS was always in a state where it could be powered down. Are you done using your computer? Just turn the power switch off. Now we have to "shutdown" which is a pain and takes time. I'd prefer the system was always in a state ready to be turned off safely, even it if took longer to operate.
Posted Jan 29, 2010 17:56 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1)
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Interesting...the only machine I've ever used that could just be turned off was a Data General Nova with core memory; turn it on, and it just picked up where it left off. Every other system I've ever used was unhappy with an abrupt turn-off.
Crash-only Linux?
Posted Jan 29, 2010 18:08 UTC (Fri) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020)
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DOS never had a "shutdown" command AFAIR. When you were done w/ your IBM PC, you flipped the power switch - of course, you never did this while it was writing to your (floppy) drives.
Crash-only Linux?
Posted Jan 29, 2010 18:33 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
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.. or when you were writing to your hard drive.
you can do this today with linux, just mount all your filesystems syncronously and you will have a system that you can shutdown at any time that it's not writing to your disk.
you will also have a system that you will find unusably slow, you don't realize how much you gain from not waiting for writes to hit disk before continuing.
Crash-only Linux?
Posted Feb 1, 2010 13:29 UTC (Mon) by Cato (subscriber, #7643)
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Actually it's quite viable to use synchronous writes on filesystems - that's how I set up all my Linux systems, having had some major hassles with data corruption on ext3. There is some performance hit but it's still a lot faster than my Windows XP laptop which has about the same CPU and RAM.
See http://lwn.net/Articles/350072/ for the details - however, I now think that the only problem is not having synchronous writes, and that LVM is largely OK. This makes sense given that LVM is used a lot in enterprise Linux servers.
Crash-only Linux?
Posted Jan 30, 2010 16:57 UTC (Sat) by filipjoelsson (subscriber, #2622)
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AFAIR you had to park the harddrive on most systems with such a device back in the day, so that wasn't universal. The Commodore 64 OTOH, was an instant off computer. ;)
Crash-only Linux?
Posted Jan 30, 2010 18:03 UTC (Sat) by SimonKagstrom (subscriber, #49801)
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Only if you weren't saving something to the tape!
Anyway, you can use halt -f to achieve the same thing you a Linux
computer. You can probably also bind it to the ACPI event when the power
button is pressed to get the desired behavior. The less brave among us would
do a sync first :-)
Crash-only Linux?
Posted Jan 30, 2010 18:19 UTC (Sat) by MattPerry (guest, #46341)
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My Amiga would allow you to to turn it off when you were done. No shutdown needed. This was a very unix-ish, fast, multitasking OS.