User data not saved on forced shutdown

srevinsaju commented 4 years ago

User data of a new user is not saved by sugar on a forced shutdown (possibly, power button) and it can have potential data loss in other components too

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:

Start a sugar debian Live Build 0.116
Install it to HDD
Restart and enter login information
Enter user data
Force close VM without ACPI shutdown
Restart VM, login with same user information

You will notice sugar asks for Name, Grade again

quozl commented 4 years ago

Yes, and this is unavoidable without slowing down Sugar by adding a wait for data to be written to media. On OLPC OS on the XO laptop, the jffs2 filesystem and powerd daemon took care of this for us; touching the power button caused a filesystem synchronisation before power was lost. On conventional operating systems such as Debian, data loss will always occur if the virtual machine is terminated before the Linux kernel completes a write-back of dirty filesystem pages. This will happen with Debian independently of Sugar, so my argument is that this is a Linux problem, not a Sugar problem. My preference is not to fix it, instead concentrating on performance over data safety. Power loss or forced close of a VM is not a normal scenario to control for.

rabbitholecomputing commented 4 years ago

Agreed, this is definitively not a Sugar-specific problem. The same thing can and does happen under Windows, and MacOS.

srevinsaju commented 3 years ago

Makes sense. Closing this :smile:

sugarlabs / sugar

User data not saved on forced shutdown #903