Re: [PATCHSET #upstream] libata: improve FLUSH error handling

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

> I do agree with the above, we should try to get the FLUSH done according 
> to spec, I meant to argue that we should bound the time spent. If my 
> laptop spends more than 30? 60? 120? seconds trying to flush a write 
> cache, I will probably be looking for a way to force it to power down ;-)

But if your PhD thesis is being written back you'd be different 8). I am
not sure we can exceed 30 seconds, currently although we set 60 second
I/O timeouts we are timing out at 30 seconds in some traces I get sent so
something is messing up our timeout handling back to the default. I've
tried tracing it and so far failed to figure it out.

> It is also worth noting that most users of ext3 run without barriers 
> enabled (and the drive write cache enabled) which means that we test 
> this corruption path on any non-UPS power failure.

It is most unfortunate that distributions continue to ship that default.

Alan