Re: Syncer "giving up" on buffers

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Jan Srzednicki wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 07:53:48PM +0300, Lefteris Chatzibarbas wrote:

> > I have a problem with kernels,  built the last couple of days, where
> > during shutdown syncer is "giving up" on buffers.  During the next boot
> > all filesystems are checked because of improper dismount.  Here follow
> > the exact messages I get:
> > ...
> > After some testing I found out that this does _not_ happen if I manually
> > unmount my ext2 filesystems, before shutting down.  In this case syncer
> > finishes without any problems.
>
> I confirm that, same thing happened in my case. But, I had just one
> buffer remaining and ext2fs mounted in read-only. It seems that it's not
> so read-only then..

Even read-only ext2fs hangs onto the buffers.  They are never dirty in
the read-only case, but they are busy so the code that waits for all
buffers to become non-dirty doesn't even look at them to decide if they
are dirty (it waits for them to become non-busy).  So even clean but
busy buffers prevent a clean shutdown.

Bruce