Re: Lost file-system story

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 10:54:40AM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 10:21:14AM +1100, Simon Burge wrote:
> > David Holland wrote:
> > 
> > > There is at least one known structural problem where atime/mtime
> > > updates do not get applied to buffers (but are instead saved up
> > > internally) so they don't get written out by the syncer.
> > > 
> > > We believe this is what causes those unmount-time writes, or at least
> > > many of them.
> > 
> > I understand the delayed atime writes were to added to reduce the number
> > of times a laptop harddisk spins up.  I've often wondered if a simple
> > sysctl could be added to control this.
> > 
> > Unmounting my /home on my main machine takes approximately a minute.  My
> 
> 
> Seconded. On a ftp server with a large filesystem (5TB, 5M inodes), shutdown
> takes a very long time too.

Isn't that more the issue of writing out the atime updates?

Joerg