truncated files after crashes/"update" on AIX PS/2

[Steve Dyer]

One of our developers has been the victim of his PS/2 crashing several
hours after initiating a VERY long compile job.  The details of the
crash aren't relevant to this question.  He noted to me that his
make.log, which should ordinarily be quite full, is almost always
0 length or is deleted by fsck upon reboot.  This is makes the crashes
even more annoying than they should be, since he loses any ability to
easily see how far he's gotten.

What I can't figure out is why a file which has been open for writing
for more than two hours, and which is steadily being appended to, should,
after a panic, reappear as length 0.  Certainly syncs have been occurring
at some regular interval, and anyway, the amount of file activity would
eventually cause MOST of the bdwrites to end up on the disk, no?

I then realized that AIX PS/2 doesn't seem to have either the V.3
"bdflush" kernel sync daemon or its user-mode predecessor, /etc/update.
Where is the equivalent feature hidden?  Not that I think that's the
solution to the problem.  Is this somehow tied up with the weird Locus
"commit" handling?  I should note we aren't running TCF here.

-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer at ursa-major.spdcc.com aka {ima,harvard,rayssd,linus,m2c}!spdcc!dyer
dyer at arktouros.mit.edu, dyer at hstbme.mit.edu