[Sugar-devel] Adventures in the land of ENOSPC

[Martin Langhoff]

Manuel Kaufmann has been looking at SL#394, and looking at the bug
report, it struck me that it was reported backwards. I would have
written: "I filled up my disk and it knocked the system out, Sugar
would not start again, etc. Oh, btw, it was with Browse".

Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this way. So I've gone and looked at
what happens with a current Sugar and OS in that case (the original
repot is very old, and so many things have changed...). I tested with
12.1.0.

I artificially filled up / with dd until barely 1MB was remaining,
then experimented with filling it up completely, then leaving a few K
free and saving stuff.

The good:
 - During the sugar session, activities politely complained that they
could not save their session when closing, nothing crashed.
 - The Journal did sometimes pop up the warning, but it was trivial to
click ok and continue.
 - I could perform Journal ops, deleting some existing Journal entries.
 - Shutdown/restart worked correctly
 - The OS and Sugar came up correctly on the next boot

The bad:
 - Next boot, my Journal was gone. Actually, it's not gone, I can see
the files in ~/.sugar/default/datastore, but it is corrupt or the
Journal thread died, so it won't display in the Journal UI. If you are
really out of disk space, you need to see them in the journal to
delete them!
 - Freeing up some space, I can start using the journal again, and new
entries survive a reboot. However, on-disk I see both old and new
entries in the 'datastore' dir.

I'll try to make time to understand wth is going on with the journal
here. IIRC, we used to have a trigger to "reindex" the journal when
the indexes seemed corrupt. That is not kicking in -- it would be
helpful if it did :-)

cheers,



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
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