Comment by jcranmer
7 years ago
> If the kernel can't flush dirty write buffers, maybe it's time to send up a flag and panic in the kernel itself?
Being unable to write to a disk is a recoverable scenario, especially in some conditions. The most common cause of disk write failures is "someone yanked the flash drive out of the computer," and the recovery is "pop up a dialog telling the user to put it back in."
Another situation: a GCSFuse volume dealing with temporary networking errors.
Or NFS being NFS.
That would be a great improvement over the ‘tell the user he shouldn’t have done that’ we have now!
I think there is a case for never throwing away dirty pages.
Ie. either the write eventually succeeds, or all other writes will block or fail until it does.