For review: NAND out of space patch.

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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david at lang.hm wrote:
| I'll go on record repeating the comments made earlier. deleting the
| students largest file is probably deleting their most important work.
| deleting anything the student made should be a last resort (and should
| probably give the student the option of what to delete in the process).

I don't think anyone really disagrees with you.  The problem here is a
matter of interim patches and unforeseen conditions.

The reports from Uruguay indicate that thousands of laptops are becoming
suddenly, inexplicably unbootable, and being sent in for reflash, after
which they are perfectly fine.  The leading theory is that most of these
failures are caused by filling up the datastore, which prevents the
machine from booting.

If a machine fills up, becomes unbootable, and is sent to a repair center
for reflash, then the student loses everything.  This script causes
unpredictable, unannounced data loss, but it is still better than losing
_all_ work, and all access to your XO.

This hackish approach is meant only as a patch to existing systems running
old builds.  Uruguay has a comprehensive system for deploying such patches
quickly.  Based on our new understanding of the urgency of the full NAND
problem, proper handling of this scenario has been elevated to top
priority for the next release (8.2).  I expect that build to include a
much cleaner, user-driven approach to freeing up space, not this sort of
silent automatic erasure.
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