Re: PATCH: Shutdown IDE before powering off.

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

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