FreeLists / haiku-development / [haiku-development] Re: Haiku page_writer maybe not working (was: Re: Haiku self-hosting.)

[Luposian <luposian@xxxxxxx>]

On Apr 1, 2008, at 11:58 PM, Urias McCullough wrote:

> On 01/04/2008, Luposian <luposian@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Apr 1, 2008, at 6:21 PM, Urias McCullough wrote:
> > > To be fair to you - I will personally try your scenario tonight on my
> > > Haiku test machine. I might even go so far as to file a Trac ticket 
> > > on
> > > your behalf if I see the same behavior and you don't get around to it
> > > first.
> >  Thank you.
> Ok, so I kept my test simple for the sake of providing an easy test 
> case.
> Boot into fresh Haiku install (on real hardware) - open screen prefs,
> change screen resolution, apply, etc, close screen prefs.
>
> Wait (several minutes in fact) generated KDL, reboot.
>
> It very clearly didn't save my screen prefs :/
My goodness... that never occurred to me!  I always knew that I had to 
reboot, to make sure screen prefs and such were saved (I've made the 
mistake of KDL'ing and "rebooting" before doing that, to my own 
dismay), but it never occurred to me that THAT and the disk writes were 
one and the same issue!  Now, it makes sense!  Thanks for the insight.
> Same test again, run sync on a terminal first, everything is fine. (as
> expected - sync is essentially the standard command for manually
> flushing the cache to disk - exists on Linux and many other OSes just
> for such a sanity purpose - it is *not* just a hack for Haiku as you
> probably are thinking).
Nah, I know enough about Terminals and Unixy things to know that it's 
not a "special tool" just for Haiku.  I just didn't remember what it 
was or that it was available to use manually.
> So, while I still believe this is blatant abuse of an incomplete
> operating system (that has not yet been designed to die like this in a
> recoverable fashion) - I admit that I can confirm the behavior here.
The more I see Haiku being able to do, the more I expect it to be able 
to do.  Like file copying, for example... you CAN'T kill it!  You used 
to be able to, but not any more!  It's unstoppable (at least in my 
multi-copy tests)!  I like to "push the envelope", just for the Halibut 
(hell of it).  I even flooded the CPU with a bunch of apps all going at 
once and tried copying that 500Mb folder a few times over (a few 500Mb 
copies all going at once, I mean) and it just hung in there!  I was 
impressed!
If I didn't like Haiku so much, I wouldn't be pushing it so hard in 
certain places.  It's only when Haiku goes "Ouch!" that I yell "Hey!". 
:-)
> I guess I've been messing with Haiku for so long, that I just
> habitually run sync from a terminal after every important disk-related
> change that I do any more. Either that or do a graceful shutdown.
If you're a native Unix geek, that's common practice for you.  I was 
born into Atari ST's and Amigas and MacOS and MacOS X.  I'm not 
familiar with using the Terminal (or unix-type commands) like second 
nature.  But I may soon learn to now... :-)
> Now for the sake of everyone's sanity - can you keep your
> long-winded-rants to a minimum before you start driving people away
> from this list? Nothing good can come of that.
My intent was never (and has never been) to drive people away... it's 
only to make people aware of the perceived importance of a given issue. 
 Something that seems like it shouldn't even exist, because file writes 
are such a basic part of any OS.  Now that I know about the whole 
Terminal "Sync" thing, I'll start using it.  Just give me a head's up 
when it's no longer necessary to use, eh? :-D
I shant disturb this newsgroup (or other topic avenues, such as OSNews) 
with any further complaints on this matter.
Now... about that 32-bit graphics anomaly... :-D  *ducks rotten 
tomatoes and other assorted items within developer's arms reach*
Latre!

Luposian