On the rare lock occasions - what's your way out (?)
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Thinking back over my 22 years of Linux usage I can't remember any lockouts. I have had a few system crashes due to power failures which recovered quite nicely when the power came back on. So if I ever had a lockout I would power off and power on.
False economy - how do you know in advance it will be overkill ?. See my opinion above re not ensuring file I/O is flushed successfully.
I disagree, it costs nothing except a few seconds to try "R K" first to see if it works, and in my experience "R K" is usually enough to unstick the current virtual console without affecting the rest of the system. As "R K" doesn't force unmount any filesystems or invoke a reboot there is no concern about flushing buffers.
I've tried the REISUB thing a few times but have never got it to work!
My solution, if I can't get a virtual console, is to turn off at the mains, then reboot. In the old days, that would lead to scolding about disks not being cleanly unmounted and you had to run fsck, but modern journalling filesystems don't seem to mind about that.
Hmm, it always works for me. It is tricky because you have to hold down ctrl+printscreen, hold those 2 down the entire time you type in REISUB.
I must be doing something right, because I haven't had a lockup in about a year. I resorted to the magic SysRq sequence once, and it did as expected. No dirty filesystem errors on reboot. But that's on my desktop. Never done it on a server.
It's important wait a period of time between each key, to give the kernel time to complete operations, especially filesystem syncing.
Ctrl+Syskey+REISUB worked for me a few times and a few times it did not on different machines.
I do not believe that there are many *alternatives* to that and power-off/reboot.., maybe wait and see if all resolves after a few hours of waiting.., never tried that.
On a British keyboard it is AltGr + Printscreen that generates a SysRq, not 'ctrl'. I can't speak for non-GB layouts).
You hold down AltGR (a.k.a. right alt), press and release printscreen (a.k.a. SysRq), then while continuing to hold down AltGr, you press and release the action keys you want the kernel to execute. Once you release AltGr, the kernel leaves "Magic SysRq" mode and keypresses are treated as normal.
ctrl-alt-backspace kills the Xserver, but the sequence can be disabled via a setting in xorg.conf, so it may not always work.
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