Andreas Schwab wrote:
I have a 160 mxxtor disk running Linux. The only problem is this mechanism. The disk requires a 8meg cache hit. As a result I cannot ever boot a clean disk. My system boots and generally works. but I cannot boot RO, the system will NEVER boot, it just reboots. E2FSCK will reports strange errors in the FILE SYSTEM> Sync will not flush this giant buffer.Ingo Schmidt <ich@der-ingo.de> writes:I have a question on fsck.ext2: How does it know if the filesystem is clean or not? I guess htere is some kind of "clean flag".Right (a flag in the super block).Who sets this flag to "clean" and when does this flag get set?On Linux the kernel clears the dirty flag on mount and sets it again on unmount.What happens at a "sync"? Is the filesystem marked as "clean" after a sync or not?Only an unmounted filesystem is considered clean. Andreas.
So folks running large disks need to know that the on disk cache is much larger than any sync will process.
josephus -- Everybody is Ignorant, just on different subjects. --- Will Rogers Jr. It's not what you dont know, it what you know that aint so. ---Josh Billings