[ardour-users] ok, spoke too soon... major crash w/ 0.9beta16.1

Joe Cooper joe at swelltech.com
Tue Jun 8 17:03:41 PDT 2004


derek holzer wrote:
> Just when I was getting to love it, Ardour froze up and made the machine 
> totally unresponsive! Couldn't even ssh in to kill the process, had to 
> reboot.

It's worth pointing out here that a user level application, like ardour, 
cannot bring down a system*.  Only a system level bug can do that (or 
hardware failure).  Ardour might tickle the bug, but if your system 
crashed or froze while running Ardour then the kernel has a bug. 
Possibly, since presumably you've never seen it outside of Ardour (or 
you wouldn't be blaming Ardour) it is in the sound card driver you are 
using.  Jack might also be to blame, since it usually runs with rt 
priority, needs special privileges, and seems to interact more closely 
with the kernel than most sound servers (I'm guessing--I don't know 
where the user/system line is in the alsa/jack stack).

* - Of course, this statement only applies to a system that has memory 
protection and preemptive multi-tasking, like Linux, and Mac OS X and 
Windows NT+.  Old Windows, Mac OS 9 and under, and early microcomputers, 
could easily be brought down by a misbehaving application and there was 
nothing the OS could do to prevent it.

On the file recovery front, I don't have much advice other than the 
usual file recovery standar practice:

Mount the disk read only and back the FS up with dd immediately before 
writing anything else to the disk.  Attempt to recover the FS /on the 
backup/ with fsck (I think Reiser has stable fsck these days).

You might try the ReiserFS support line for some added help (they have a 
"$25 gets an answer" page on the namesys.com site, and they might be 
worth having on your side during the recover process if the files have 
more than $25 value).  I reckon $25 is a bargain for presumably 
competent support.



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