: Resilience to disk errors certainly isn't Linux's best point...
: Indeed, as you describe, any process that hits a bad sector is put in
: an uninterruptable sleep and cannot be killed. This causes attempts to
: shutdown to fail, and hence results in filesystem damage that would not
: have been necessary.
My experience agrees with yours. A CD-ROM timeout would kill a Linux system.
(But I have not seen problems the past half year or so.)
: The complicated path of critical errors (via a user process "syslogd")
: does not help either. As you describe, that process easily can get stuck
: and you have no display of errors anymore.
: (it is worst when using X, because you can't see the messages that are
: written directly to the console screen until you exit X, which is of course
: impossible without locking up the entire system)
You can always cat /dev/vcsX, and even see the text, if any, on the console
that X is using.
Andries