Re: 2.7 (future kernel) wish

[Jim Crilly <jim@why.dont.jablowme.net>]

Rob Love wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-12-27 at 22:03, Jim Crilly wrote:
> 
> 
>>Generally it just complains that you pulled out the device prematurely, 
>>I've never seen one give a STOP error from that but I guess a bad driver 
>>or USB controller could cause anything.
> 
> 
> It would be pretty easy to screw things up if you pull out a device in
> the middle of use.
> 
> 
>>When you insert a device like a USB stick Windows puts a little icon 
>>next to the clock in the system tray that you're supposed to use to stop 
>>the device before pulling it, effectively it unmounts and stops (or 
>>atleast releases the device from) the driver so the device can be 
>>'safely' removed.
> 
> 
> This is useful, and something I think we need on the Linux desktop (stay
> tuned).
> 

I agree, that's one of the reasons I posted at all. Little things like 
this can make a big difference, even though I've seen a lot of users not 
notice the little icon and have to be told about it.

Maybe when the icon appears have a tool-tip that pops up and says 
something like "your USB device is ready for user at /mnt/usb, click 
here when you're done" or something like that to make it more noticable 
that they shouldn't just yank it.

But I seem to be getting OT for this list...

> 
>>I also believe Windows mounts any removable device 
>>synchronously so that if you do pull it out prematurely the damage done 
>>is limited.
> 
> 
> Eww, I hope not, that would be excruciatingly slow.  It might adjust the
> buffer writeback to be really short (even nearly immediate) but
> synchronous I/O is a different story, and much slower.
> 
> 	Rob Love
> 
> 

Perhaps synchronous was the wrong term =) But it does atleast seem to do 
less buffering for removable devices or I could just be fooled by 
something else slowing it down.