287659 - Thunderbird acts un-nice on XFS-filesystem. settings lost on unclean XFS shutdown

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Eero Volotinen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050324 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050324 Firefox/1.0.2

Usually on XFS-filesystem unclean shutdown, all thunderbird settings are lost.
(they are on .thunderbird directory, but th cannot reload them?)
Why?  way the thunderbird handles files so it easy loses all settings.

This is very ugly.



Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Thomas Steffen]

I have the same problem with mozilla-mail. What I find is that I run mozilla 
after the crash, and I have lost all my settings. So I close mozilla and look 
at the profile; 
  prefs.bak is filled with zeros, so it seems to have the correct size 
  prefs.js is ok, but contains only the default settings 
 
I think what happens is that mozilla writes a new prefs.js before the crash. 
Due to aggressive caching in the XFS filesystem, the file entry in the 
directory is created (written to the log), but the file content is kept in 
memory and not written do disk at the same time. So when mozilla starts up, it 
finds only zeros in prefs.js, moves it to prefs.bak and creates a new one. I 
think a call to fsync in the right place might solve the problem. 
 
I have seen the problem just now with mozilla-1.7.5 on Debian Sarge/AMD64, 
kernel 2.6.11, and about a year ago on some earlier mozilla version on Debian 
Sarge/i386 on kernel 2.6.0. 
 
I am not sure whether I can reproduce the problem, but I can try my test to 
test any patches.  
 
Thomas 

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
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Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.