Summary of "Magma notes" issues

lex at cc.gatech.edu lex at cc.gatech.edu
Mon Jul 12 17:44:30 UTC 2004


Jochen Riekhof <jochen at riekhof.de> wrote:
> Yep, I see what you mean. I just wanted to make shure for the community 
> that kill -9 is usually not a good idea to terminate apps :-).

But shouldn't it be?  If people kill -9'ed with regularity, then the
bugs would be found and software would be more reliable.  And anyway,
software should tolerate it, and once it does tolerate it, -9'ing is
very convienient.  If you all can forgive me for a moment of heresy: a
very nice feature of MS-DOS 2.11 was that you could in fact turn the
machine off and not be afraid of losing data, so long as you had hit
"save" recently.  Further, EROS is an experimental OS that will have
this same feature, but you don't even need to press "save".

	http://www.eros-os.org
	
(And, since this is Squeak-List, let me mention that EROS is going back
to the future, too: Squeak itself has had automatic persistence, and
KeyKOS is an operating system that had automatic snapshotting.)

Anyway, history aside, there's a very practical reason I mention all
this:

	Squeak itself does 1-phase snapshots!
	
If you turn the power off while Squeak is mid-save, you can lose your
image completely.  I posted a changeset to fix this long ago, but it
probably needs to be revisited.  It is a fairly portable changeset, even
though it is at the VM level.  Probably it would need some tinkering to
work in current Squeak's, but it may interest people even in its current
state.

	http://impara.de/~bert/swiki.gsug.org/sqfixes/1277.html



-Lex



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