Re: PATCH: Shutdown IDE before powering off.

Jeff Garzik
2004-01-22T21:08:11Z

James H. Cloos Jr. wrote:
>>>>>>"John" == John Bradford <john@grabjohn.com> writes:
>
>
>>>This spins down the disk(s) when you're just doing do a reboot.
>>>That's fairly irritating and could affect reboot times if one has
>>>many disks.
>
>
> John> I think it is an attempt to force some broken drives to flush
> John> their cache, but I wonder whether it will simply move the
> John> problem from one set of broken drives to another :-).
>
> It will. I've had to work with a few drives or drive combos over
> the years that would not spin up reliably. It was vital to keep
> them spinning once they were (all) up. Adding this would make
> reboot unnecessarily unuseable in such cases. Perhaps just
> flush, pause, flush would work as well?

Flush is what is needed, flush is what it does in 2.4, and flush is what
it should do in 2.6 :)

Rebooting does not shut down nor unload the IDE driver, so it is
-critical- that a flush occurs before reboot, otherwise it is entirely
possible that writes the drive has ack'd back to the OS will not
actually get written to the media.

Jeff