User data not saved on forced shutdown

[srevinsaju]

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]

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]

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

[srevinsaju]

Makes sense. Closing this :smile: