Re: [PATCH] libata: track spindown status and skip spindown_compat if possible

[Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>]

Francesco Pretto wrote:
> Tejun Heo <htejun <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> Our assumption that most distros issue STANDBYNOW seems wrong.  The
>> upstream sysvinit and thus many distros including gentoo and opensuse
>> don't take any action for libata disks on spindown.  We can skip
>> compat handling for these distros so that they don't need to update
>> anything to take advantage of kernel-side shutdown.
>>
> 
> Working around the workaround won't make confusion? Won't this break again
> implementations that was actually issuing STANDBYNOW, assuming that they
> actually exist? Only wondering, can't say for any init implementation in
> particular.

Yeah, it's a big mess.  With this patch applied, what happens is...

* If your shutdown(8) does issue STANDBYNOW : you get the big fat
warning and kernel won't issue STANDBYNOW.

* If your shutdown(8) doesn't issue STANDBYNOW : kernel issues FLUSH
CACHE followed by STANDBYNOW and all is well and dandy without any
userland modification.

I think it isn't too bad.  Any better ideas?

-- 
tejun