Re: Flames over -- Re: Which is simpler?

[Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, Kyle Moffett wrote:

> Which causes worse data-loss, writing out cached pages and filesystem  
> metadata to a filesystem that has changed in the mean-time (possibly  
> allocating those for metadata, etc) or forcibly unmounting it as  
> though the user pulled the cable?  Most filesystems are designed to  
> handle the latter (it's the same as a hard-shutdown), whereas _none_  
> are designed to handle the former.

That's a good point.  Furthermore, any decent suspend script will flush
all dirty buffers to disk before suspending anything.

> A good set of suspend scripts should handle the hardware-suspend with  
> no extra work because hardware supporting hardware-suspend basically  
> inevitably supports USB low-power-mode,

Unfortunately a lot of hardware doesn't support USB low-power mode.  I 
guess you'd say therefore it doesn't really support hardware-suspend.  
This may be so, but it's small comfort to the owners of those systems.

I have to admit, although technically Phillip's argument is wrong, from a
useability standpoint it is right.  Windows allows users to disconnect and
reconnect USB storage devices while the system is hibernating, with no
apparent ill effects -- although I've never tried to unplug one device and
then plug in a different one on the same port while the computer was
asleep.  I don't know to what extent Windows checks descriptors/serial 
numbers/disk labels/whatever when it wakes up.

Alan Stern

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