Symptoms: If you control-C to exit nwipe at the end of a successful
wipe you would get a segmentation fault. If nwipe log data was being
sent to stdout rather than to a log file, then you would not see the
log in the terminal windows after nwipe had exited. This patch fixes
those problems by creating a tri-state wipe flag for each wipe
thread. The main thread after having launched the wipe threads
will wait for ALL wipe flags to report that the wipe routine has
completed and the thread has exited. Only at that time does the
main() routine then proceed with joining the threads and waiting
for the join to confirm the thread has indeed exited. This join
is important as the thread will not actually exit until the OS
has flushed the disk buffers. Currently nwipe does not use O_SYNC
where data is sent straight to disk. Therefore it's important
to wait for data to be flushed before exiting nwipe. Part of this
patch is introducing a "please wait .. disks are being flushed"
prior to exiting nwipe otherwise it might look like nwipe had
hung. A disk flush in terms of how long it takes, can be from
instantly to 30 seconds or more, depending on how much system
memory you have, when the last sync occurred and if you have
changed the sync option from it's default. Something else to
note is that when all wipes have finished nwipe displays "Enter
To Exit" on the status line at the bottom of the screen. I
believe typing 'enter' rather than control-c did not produce a
segmentation fault. Irrespective, both methods of exiting nwipe
have been tested and confirmed to now work correctly. Tested
overnight with two drives using multiple wipe methods,
verification and blanking.
Symptoms: If you control-C to exit nwipe at the end of a successful
wipe you would get a segmentation fault. If nwipe log data was being
sent to stdout rather than to a log file, then you would not see the
log in the terminal windows after nwipe had exited. This patch fixes
those problems by creating a tri-state wipe flag for each wipe
thread. The main thread after having launched the wipe threads
will wait for ALL wipe flags to report that the wipe routine has
completed and the thread has exited. Only at that time does the
main() routine then proceed with joining the threads and waiting
for the join to confirm the thread has indeed exited. This join
is important as the thread will not actually exit until the OS
has flushed the disk buffers. Currently nwipe does not use O_SYNC
where data is sent straight to disk. Therefore it's important
to wait for data to be flushed before exiting nwipe. Part of this
patch is introducing a "please wait .. disks are being flushed"
prior to exiting nwipe otherwise it might look like nwipe had
hung. A disk flush in terms of how long it takes, can be from
instantly to 30 seconds or more, depending on how much system
memory you have, when the last sync occurred and if you have
changed the sync option from it's default. Something else to
note is that when all wipes have finished nwipe displays "Enter
To Exit" on the status line at the bottom of the screen. I
believe typing 'enter' rather than control-c did not produce a
segmentation fault. Irrespective, both methods of exiting nwipe
have been tested and confirmed to now work correctly. Tested
overnight with two drives using multiple wipe methods,
verification and blanking.
Moved most of the documentation from `README` to
`README.md`, and added MarkDown formatting when
required. Also move the release notes to a
`CHANGELOG.md`, and made sure the formatting
was consistent.
Instead of defaulting to only calling fdatasync at the end of a wipe, it now defaults to calling fdatasync every 1000000 blocks. This shows a unresponsive drive far quicker and also allows wipe threads to complete and be cancelled within a couple of seconds if a wipe is aborted with control-c.
1. When running nwipe in a 80x24 terminal such as ALT-F2 or shredos the line length needs to limited to 80 characters otherwise the text looks misaligned.
2. Added a line between each option to make it more legible.
This fix allows nwipe to log an error, specifically the exit code of dmidecode if the exit code
is not 0.
For instance if dmidecode is not installed on a system, then dmidecode reports the following
[2019/11/04 22:12:50] nwipe: info: nwipe_log_sysinfo: dmidecode failed, "dmidecode -s bios-version" exit status = 127
nwipe does not abort on this error but does log the error and continue.
