> ext2fs should be quite robust: Even pulling the plug at any time should not > corrupt the filesystem beyond what e2fsck can repair.
Let us assume that ext2fs writes a block of metadata to disk. In the kernel, in the middle of the DMA operation, the kernel panics. There is no guarantee that e2fsck will be able to handle this case. In other words, although a write operation may appear atomic to ext2fs, in the kernel, that operation is composed of many smaller atomic operations (with respect to the hardware) during any of which, the kernel may crash.
