On February 13, 2002 06:21 am, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> > IMO, the SuS definition sucks. We really do want to do our best to
> > ensure that pending writes are committed to disk before sys_sync()
> > returns. As long as that doesn't involve waiting until mid-August.
>
> The current behaviour allows the system to hang forever waiting for
> sync(2). In practice it does actually wait minutes on a busy system (df
> has --no-sync for that reason) when there is no reason for that to happen.
> I think that not only sucks worse, it's non-standard as well.
Nothing sucks worse than losing your data. Let's concentrate on fixing
shutdown, not breaking (linux) sync.
> > For example, ext3 users get to enjoy rebooting with `sync ; reboot -f'
> > to get around all those silly shutdown scripts. This very much relies
> > upon the sync waiting upon the I/O.
>
> Because people count on something broken we should keep the bug? You do
> realize that the sync may NEVER finish?
You do realize that if you lose your data you may NEVER get it back? ;-)
> That's not in theory, I have news
> servers which may wait overnight without finishing a "df" iwthout the
> option.
OK, what you're really saying is, we need a way to kill the sync process
if it runs overtime, no?
> > I mean, according to SUS, our sys_sync() implementation could be
> >
> > asmlinkage void sys_sync(void)
> > {
> > return;
> > }
> >
> > Because all I/O is already scheduled, thanks to kupdate.
>
> I think the wording is queued, and I would read that as "on the
> elevator."
Well now you're adding your own semantics to SuS, welcome to the party.
I vote we keep the existing and-don't-come-back-until-you're-done Linux
semantics.
> Your example is a good example of bad practive, since even with
> ext3 a program creating files quickly would lose data, even though the
> directory structure is returned to a known state, without stopping the
> writing processes the results are unknown.
Huh? You know about journal commit, right?
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