[ On Monday, April 28, 2003 at 18:20:30 (+0200), Matthias Buelow wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: raidframe parity always dirty after reboot
>
> But swap is a kernel entity;

No, "swap" is not really a kernel entity, it's a form of intermediate
external storage used by the kernel (just like any filesystem).

> surely your argument could be extended to
> the buffer cache aswell;

Nope.  There's no way to turn on, turn off, or otherwise tune or
configure the buffer cache from a userlevel process (potential future
sysctl tweaks aside).  Not only that but the buffer cache isn't a
stateful external thing either -- it's just part of volatile memory.

Strictly speaking my argument does extend to mount points though, and
indeed in traditional Unix systems the "umount" had to be done
explicitly at shutdown.  I would not be unhappy if NetBSD required this
as well.  I still tend to not trust the automatic kernel unmounts, even
though I've no technical reason for not trusting it, and so I often do
"umount -a" myself when shutting down from single user mode.  I've even
been known to "umount -u -o ro /" too.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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