At 14:50 Uhr +0100 04.11.2002, Robert Ian Smit wrote:
I've had system crashes while reading from bad floppies, and almost-lockups (system continues to run but is not responsible during that time) when writing to one particular scsi cd burner (both on a mac).I was surprised that this issue took down the system on Linux. I understand, as nate explained, that hardware errors will always result in trouble but I expected the kernel to react differently. (Or is this a limitation of x86 or the issue you mention?)
There has been discussion on the linux kernel mailing list on high availability (reliability) and drivers about a month ago. It seems that it's a known fact that many drivers don't recover gracefully from hardware problems. Since linux has a monolythic design, it relies on drivers being cooperative, if they don't, crashes may be the result. Possibly the windows nt/w2k systems behave better in such situations, I don't know (at least they are told to be based on a microkernel design and so should theoretically be able to recover from subsystem failures).
"Usually" (i.e. good drivers) it's no problem and one just gets io errors from a bad drive/media. (I've had a cdrom drive die in the middle of the operation and the system continued running.)Perhaps using a cdrom is not a good idea on a production system. Thankfully the crash happened on my desktop which is the least critical of all my systems.
Christian.
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