Best system for resiliance to ungraceful shutdowns

[drkirkby]

I know one should always shut down modern operating systems gracefully, but I have application where a PC will be battery powered (not a laptop), and will I suspect under some circumstances not get a graceful shutdown.

I know the ZFS file system used on Solaris will always recover from an ungraceful shutdown - it does not even run fsck. But Linux file systems lack the sophistication of ZFS.

Is there any file system used on Linux which can take this abuse and recover quickly without human intervention?

Are there any Linux distributions which are particularly good at taking this sort of abuse?

The PC will use a solid state disk and be integrated into a custom piece of hardware, but does need to be able to run X based applications, so I'm not looking for a small distribution that can be embedded inside something like a router. It must be able to support USB, a soundcard and a VGA monitor.

How easy would it be to run Linux from a read-only file system? I know you can get bootable DVDs, but this machine will not have space for a DVD drive. So an ideal solution would be to boot from a read-only file system, so the file system should (hopefully) never be corrupted.

Dave

[Rubberman]

Most of the current journaling file systems will recover from this quite easily, such as ext3 or ext4. The jfs or xfs file systems (probably require custom configured kernels) will also do well, and jfs is used a lot in embedded systems where this sort of situation is not uncommon. My NAS arrays use xfs, and they have been dead-bang reliable even when there were serious power outages where the UPS could not keep them alive until the power was back on.

[drkirkby]

Most of the current journaling file systems will recover from this quite easily, such as ext3 or ext4. The jfs or xfs file systems (probably require custom configured kernels) will also do well, and jfs is used a lot in embedded systems where this sort of situation is not uncommon. My NAS arrays use xfs, and they have been dead-bang reliable even when there were serious power outages where the UPS could not keep them alive until the power was back on.

Would you suggest JFS is the most reliable for an embedded system, which is basically what this is? I have used JFS on AIX before, but never on Linux. If I understand you correctly though, this will require a custom kernel. I've not much idea about how difficult it is to build custom kernels on Linux. But long-term, if JFS would give me better resilience, I might well install that.

[Rubberman]

Personally, I only have anecdotal evidence to this. I have not personally performed, or read of, discrete reliability testing of these file systems. Sorry, but if it is REALLY important to you, then you will need to do this yourself, or find the appropriate reference material.