Serious problem with kconfig et al.

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Friday 29 October 2004 03:13, Knut Johansson wrote:
> Hi all
>
> First of I will start to say that I know the the cause of the problem
> are not KDE related, but probably caused by sloppy administration and
> experimentation with unstable drivers etc. But what causes it are not
> important, but the effect on my KDE desktop are. This is not a new
> problem, I have experienced it on different installs since the KDE
> 2.something days. Since I feel this is a serious problem with the
> configuration infrastructure an touches most applications, I think
> it's better to have the discussion on the mailinglist rather than
> filing it in bugzilla.
>
> With abnormal termination of KDE applications "loose" their
> configuration and reverts to the default setting. With abnormal
> termination I consider situations like forced reboot on lock ups,
> powerloss and similar. I have been using different kinds of
> journaling FSes, and have never experienced FS corruption in these
> cases.
>
> It looks like some settings are more "easy" to lose compared to
> others, in my case the settings in LookNFeel->style and
> Peripherals->mouse are different than defalt and the most likely to
> loose their settings. Somewhat less frequent are the loss of settings
> from kicker and the running applets.
>
> The loss of some desktop settings are not a big problem, but this
> missbehavior affects all running applications. The loss of your
> nettwork settings in KMail are more than a little inconvenience,
> specially when you use several accounts. And even worse are the
> effect when this happens to KWallet.
>
> I'm not quite sure whats happening, but looking at some of the
> damaged rc files they are mostly filled with random binary garbage or
> pieces of other rc files. Actually my kdewallet.kwl file now contains
> a big part of the kdeglobals rc file.

This looks very much like a file system corruption. Actually, the FS is 
not corrupted since you are using a journaling file system, but the 
data inside the files is corrupted. If you want to prevent this from 
happening then you have to use the slow "journal" mode. If you use 
"ordered" or even "writeback" mode then the file system will just make 
sure that the file system meta data is never corrupted, but it can't 
guarantee that the data itself is not corrupted.

So if you have a system which crashes regularly then you should use the 
"journal" mode at least for your data/home partition.

Regards,
Ingo
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