Re: wierd behaviour...

Markus Gutschke (gutschk@uni-muenster.de)
1 Mar 1997 09:14:10 +0100

"Richard B. Johnson" <root@analogic.com> writes:
> True. But if you write a "normal" program. There is no such disk
> access..........
>
> main() {
> int i;
> if(fork())
> wait(&i);
> }
>
> When the parent waits for the child, there is no sync() after it exits.
> Try it. You'll see.

If you write a program that launches sub-processes and then terminates
without waiting on them, then you will notice the sync()-ing.
Depending on how you configured your system, this can be /very/
annoying.

I use the "kdsound" patch to reroute the system beep thru my sound
card and without modifying "init", my system would always engage in
heavy disk I/O whenever the console bell rang! Also, my system used to
sync() about every 10s (I cannot find, what was causing this), which
was also somehow related to "init"'s strange behavior. This /is/
undesirable. A one-line patch to "init" resolved this; thanks to
whoever pointed this out.

Markus

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