Re: write alignment matters?

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 02:00:54PM -0400, Paul Koning wrote:
 > >> It took the invention of that paragon of OS's - DOS - to teach
 > >> the populace that simply pulling the device/media was an acceptable
 > >> operating procedure.
 > > 
 > > That's hardly fair. Until the Mac appeared in 1984 every small
 > > computer that had a floppy drive had a floppy drive you could
 > > open/eject arbitrarily, and none of them required explicit unmount.
 > > This was true of at least some bigger systems as well; as I recall
 > > RT-11 did not require explictly unmounting floppies before changing
 > > them.
 > 
 > Sure it is fair.  The fact that some operating systems had
 > extremely simple/primitive file systems without any caching means
 > that those systems were capable of surviving file device pulls.

It is not fair to blame it on DOS; DOS was neither the first nor the
last system to work this way. Many of them had caching (even writeback
caching!) too.

 > But it isn't reasonable to consider that a feature.  RT-11 was in
 > fact an unusual example in its days; few if any operating systems
 > of that era had a "just yank it" property.

Oh, I'm not saying it's a feature. However, requiring explicit unmount
(up to and including killing off uncooperating or leftover processes)
is not a feature either.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost