tkh’s blog

SGI filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. I think it was doomed since nvidia had released GeForce.

New Kernel Feature

I stumbled on the KernelNewbies Wiki about a new feature in kernel 2.6.16:

Add /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. Writing to this will cause the kernel to drop clean caches, dentries and inodes from memory, causing that memory to become free. This is mainly useful for benchmarking, for getting consistent results between filesystem benchmarks without rebooting. To free pagecache: “echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches”, to free dentries and inodes: “echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches”, to free pagecache, dentries and inodes: “echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches”. As this is a non-destructive operation and dirty objects are not freeable, the user should run `sync’ first.

It’s sweet.

Hard Drive Crash

Last week, my dual core Athlon 64 box crashed. I was converting a movie to mpeg2 to burn a DVD video on Windows when it happened. Then the weird things happened and eventually I had to repartition the hard drives. The only good side was that I managed to recover the partition table from the corrupted one. However, almost all data on / and /home went to the lost+found directory when I did xfs_repair. I recovered most of important data since I had one-week old backup of /home, but it was the worst nightmare. I don’t know what causes the problem.