Re: [patch] sys_sync livelock fix

[davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)]

In article <3C69FB14.167B899E@zip.com.au> you write:
| Bill Davidsen wrote:
| > 
| > > But we want sync to be useful.
| > 
| >   No one has proposed otherwise. Unless you think that a possible hang is
| > useful, the questions becomes adding all dirty buffers to the elevator,
| > then (a) waiting or (b) returning. Either satisfies SuSv2.
| 
| errr.  Bill.  I wrote the patch.   Please take this as a sign
| that I'm not happy with the current implementation :)

Sorry, I had been sitting at a keyboard for about 16 hours when I typed
that, and didn't look at the sender... Lot's of other typos in there as
well, sign of need for 3-4 hours sleep.

But I think sync(2) as a checkpoint, write out all dirty at the moment
of sync call, is fine and deterministic, and all that.

That serves the shutdown case as well, if there is a process in some
unkillable state, but somehow still writing, at least the system will go
down. I'm not sure any process not killable with kill -9 is able to do
anything, but I won't bet on it.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.