Removing content from Journal should work even if NAND is full.

[cscott]

This might already "just work", but needs to be tested and confirmed (ideally for each release).

Even/especially if NAND is completely full, you must be able to delete content from the Journal to free up space.

When archiving old content to the school server is implemented, freeing archived content should also work if/when NAND is full.

[cscott]

(In #7125) Here's a list of tasks associated with this general bug, and trac #s for them:

• the initscripts should be sure to unfreeze the dcon if/when X fails to start. This ensures that the system is obviously recoverable (you can recover by rebooting with the check key held down, but this is not obvious!). (#7586)
• sugar should, ideally, start even if flash is full. It is currently failing when writing to ~olpc/.boot_time or some such, and crashing. (#7587)
• once sugar starts, there should be a message indicating that the NAND is critically full. (#7588)
• trying to save new content to the journal should also give an obvious message that the NAND is full. (#7589)
• removing content from the journal should work even if NAND is full. (#7590)
• automatically remove content from the journal is NAND is full? (controversial) (#7591)
• Jffs2 is slow when it fills/root should have reserved space (#5317)

[marco]

Is this actually a blocker or are we happy with all the other measures we are putting in place to address this problem?

[cscott]

This is a blocker iff we don't provide another means to remove content from the journal. Tomeu was going to write a simple "remove content" activity, for example. That would suffice. CJB's command-line "prompt for files to delete" solution would also suffice. But we need to have a clear answer to how you recover from NAND full, and we haven't made a decision yet.

I plan to work on this bug more this week.

[gregorio]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for looking in to this one.

I don't think the command line option will work, but I wont rule it out. I can say that Uruguay already rejected the option where the script automatically decides what to remove and deletes user content or activities.

They want the user to decide what to remove. That's my only hard requirement at this stage, aside from the basic point that it must boot no matter how full the NAND has become.

Let me know when you come up with as I need to run it by Uruguay and I'd rather get their input before we finalize.

BTW this will be a great feature to convince them that they need to upgrade.

Thanks,

Greg S

[tomeu]

My current understanding is that this has been moved to 9.1.0.