Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

jareno · Joined: 13 Feb 2007 Posts: 14

I'm Running Puppy 2.13 on a 1GB Memorex Thumbdrive and I was installing a bunch of media files when I was un-mounting a drive Puppy *FROZE*. So, the only thing I could do was restart, but when I restarted all of my files were still there! I didn't save, everything was in ramdisk. What Happened? Has this happened to anyone else?

Pizzasgood · Posted: Tue 13 Feb 2007, 23:58 Post subject:

Two things to consider:
A. The ramdisk only applies to stuff in Puppy's filesystem. That means if you mount something else and work with it, things will save (nearly) immediately to it.
B. The stuff that is in the ramdisk gets saved every thirty minutes.

Speculation:

If you've done a bunch in the ramdisk, it may take some time for Puppy to save it back to the file. While that is happening, everything can slow or even stop. That may have been the "freeze" you reported.

Also, due to how Linux does things, changes to a mounted drive also don't necessarily occur immediately. They'll be written whenever the OS feels like it, when the 'sync' command is given, or when the drive is unmounted. If you do a bunch to the drive, when you unmount it there may be a pause while it furiously tries to write all the changes so the drive can be unmounted. That also could have been the "freeze".

Sometimes, on the other hand, something just doesn't go as planned, and stuff really does freeze. One of the more likely times for such an event is during unmounting, because something just might be accessing that data and not want to stop.