In message <200006171221.VAA03910@mallee.awadi>, Brett Lymn writes:
>According to John Hawkinson:

>>No, see above ("sync"). Perhaps it is poorly named. I don't know
>>what to do about that.
>
>Depends on where you got your experience, actually.

I don't really think this affects whether it is poorly named or not.

>At a Sun boot-prom command line "sync" does what ddb does - does a
>kernel dump and reboots.

I was never totallyo clear if that was a bug or a feature.
It's supposed to call the os-specific "sync" method, which
presumably should preserve file-system state, and I never
could get a solid conclusion as to whether the designers really
intended for it to crash or if this was oversight or a feature
never completely implemented that someone chose to then
document.

But doing it that way is a terrible idea. Depending on hardware
and OS, it's terribly unreliable and often doesn't work, producing
hard hangs (Solaris 2.5.1 on a sparc 5 comes to mind). Much better
and reliable and os-independant is to force a trap with "0 set-pc go".

--jhawk