Re: Syncer "giving up" on buffers

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Kevin Oberman wrote:

> > Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 10:53:43 +0200
> > From: Jan Srzednicki <winfried_at_student.agh.edu.pl>
> > Sender: owner-freebsd-current_at_freebsd.org
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 07:53:48PM +0300, Lefteris Chatzibarbas wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > 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:
> > >
> > >   Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `vnlru' to stop...stopped
> > >   Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `bufdaemon' to stop...stopped
> > >   Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `syncer' to stop...stopped
> > >
> > >   syncing disks, buffers remaining... 8 8 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6
> > >   giving up on 6 buffers
> > >   Uptime: 41m20s
> > >   pfs_vncache_unload(): 1 entries remaining
> > >   Shutting down ACPI
> > >   Rebooting...
> > >
> > > 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..
>
> While this seems to impact ext2fs system, the issue of syncer failing
> on read-only volumes is also showing up in cases where ext2fs systems
> are not present. See reports over the past couple of days on this.
>
> I can't be sure that these are the same problem, but they sure do look
> like the same thing.
>

The ext2 problem is likely related to a change that I made to ext2
recently.  I always unmounted my volumes before rebooting, so I missed
this case.  The fix is simple.  I will look at it tonight.  Until then,
you just need to unmount your volumes and it should work just fine.

I don't know of any general syncer issues outside of this.  I doubt it is
related to this specific ext2fs bug though.

Cheers,
Jeff