One sync for the disks and two for the operator's peace of mind...
On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Ronald Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
On Jul 17, 2014, at 4:16 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
I think that's is a problem in that it needs to be data blocks, inodes, and
finally superblocks to do the least damage in a crash.
That is definitely the case and that was perhaps the biggest fix in BSD (and
other later) was to make the file system writing more consistent so at least
you didn't get trashed filesystems but at worst got some orphaned blocks
that needed intervention to reclaim.
It was mandatory for operators at JHU to understand how the file system was
laid out on disk, and what icheck/dcheck reported and what the options to
fix things. Link counts that were too low and dups in free should NEVER
happen with an intelligently ordered set of I/O operations, but thats not
what Version 6 UNIX had. It wasn't uncommon to find several errors in the
file system that would be degenerate system faults if not corrected.
But all that aside, even in those shakey days, typing sync multiple times
really didn't accomplish anything and it because less useful as the file
systems became more stable.
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