Re: Syncer "giving up" on buffers

> Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 17:42:25 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Jeff Roberson <jroberson_at_chesapeake.net>
> 
> 
> 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.

I want to confirm that this was only addressed to those using
ext2fs. In my case I am not using ext2fs and am seeing this issue when
no partitions of any sort have been mounted. (/ mounted RO, of
course.)

Manually running fsck in standalone mode does leave the file systems
clean, just leaves several (I've seem between 1 and 12) dirty buffers.

This does make it sound like there is a particular issue with ext2fs,
though.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman_at_es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634