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This is a general question when using Ubuntu but I am using 20.04 Budgie Desktop on an HP Pavilion laptop. I only have 8GB RAM and so occasionally I need to do a hard reboot (i.e. hold down the power button) because the graphics I am working with have overloaded the RAM; typically it happens when I'm dealing with large Inkscape documents with >100k objects. I was just wondering if it's a good idea to force fsck (as in this post) or does the system check disk health automatically?

Thanks for any advice,

Jeremy

JJGabe
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  • Although I very very rarely hard boot my notebook, I have made that setup on my system to check my disks during boot every 10 days or so. Btw, It takes less than 2 seconds to check a healthy disk (SSD). However, you should avoid hard boots as much as possible; if you cannot increase RAM, at least you can create a large "swap file" assuming that you have an SSD. – FedKad Nov 15 '21 at 19:12
  • Try to avoid hard shutdowns. If possible you can do this REISUB: https://askubuntu.com/questions/926461/whats-the-difference-between-the-magic-reisub-reset-and-holding-down-the-power & https://askubuntu.com/questions/11002/alt-sysrq-reisub-doesnt-reboot-my-laptop/334292#334292 Newer systems now require an update to config to have it fully working. sudo nano /etc/sysctl.d/10-magic-sysrq.conf Then change the number in line 26 from 176 to 244 i.e. kernel.sysrq = 244 – oldfred Nov 15 '21 at 20:48
  • If you create and use swap, your system is less likely to fail in this way. Use free to see. Read man free mkswap swapon. – waltinator Nov 15 '21 at 21:14
  • Thank you all for the assistance. Unfortunately I do not have a solid-state drive so while I could increase the swap since I have more than enough memory, I wasn't sure how effective that would be. My understanding is that processes that aren't actively using the RAM at the time would be sent to the swap but if I'm actively editing in Inkscape, for example, all the information would need to stay in the regular memory. Does that sound right? – JJGabe Nov 15 '21 at 21:37
  • @oldfred re; "Newer systems now require an update to config to have it fully working"... please define "newer systems". Do you mean newer hardware, or newer version of Ubuntu? Why the value change? – heynnema Nov 15 '21 at 21:52
  • Do not know when it changed. REISUB used to always work. Then saw posts that said only R & B worked. Then saw setting to change it. Somewhere with systemD or start of use of systemD seemed to be the change. So not sure what versions of Ubuntu need setting other than newer systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key – oldfred Nov 16 '21 at 03:41

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