[TriLUG] Fault-tolerant FS for battery-operated Linux

[Eric Blau via TriLUG]

Hi Brian,

I've had good luck using ext4 with the "data=journal" and "commit=X" mount
options where X is the number of seconds you want before data is synced to
disk. This can hurt performance, but I've found that it works well for
preventing corruption after a hard power down.

My use case was a robot for FIRST Robotics
<http://www.firstinspires.org/> using
NVIDIA Jetson TK1 and TX1 boards. Both boards use ARM CPUs. We record video
from our robot and save it to an SSD drive.

Before using ext4 with these options, we were using NTFS. The robot
abruptly powers off at the end of a match. Our video files were getting
corrupted to the point where the directory entries showed ????? and could
not be recovered by any of the tools we tried. When we switched to ext4
with the aforementioned options, this no longer occurs.

Good luck!
-Eric

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 4:42 PM, Brian Henning via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org
> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I'm working on designing and building a quadcopter using a Raspberry Pi
> Zero for its brain.  The desire for a flight recorder has led me to
> consider what would be the best filesystem for a system that could be
> unceremoniously shut down at any moment (battery exhaustion and physical
> crashes being high on the list of causes).
>
> My plan is to have the root partition mounted read-only, with a separate
> partition for logging (perhaps mounted under /var).
>
> Given that the hardware involved is a MicroSD card and a slowish ARM CPU,
> what do folks recommend as a good fault-tolerant FS for the writable
> partition?  The ideal being as much forensic data available in the event of
> the thing falling out of the sky.
>
> Cheers,
> -B
>
> --
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