------ Forwarded Article <86k6kn$u15rr@fido.engr.sgi.com>
------ From Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
> I know I can get around this by forcing a BLKFLSBUF ioctl to the device after
> the unmount but this strikes me as a bug in the linux umount semantics which
> will bite more people than just me as linux enters the SAN arena.
Solve policy problems in user space. If you want a umount to do that put
it in the _application_. I don't want my caches flushing all the time just
because I remount stuff
Alan
------ End of Forwarded Article
Alan,
I believe it would be better for the kernel to invalidate the buffers
when the 'umount' system call is issued on a device. The reasons
I believe this are:
1) Production users of linux don't remount filesystems.
2) Most other unix systems will invalidate the buffers
upon umount, thus an expectation has been placed into
the customers awareness that such behavior would also
apply to linux.
3) A user-space solution is much more error prone.
If there is a weighting of features for production systems
versus features for developers (specifically kernel developers),
I'd bias towards production systems - this includes making the
system as bulletproof as possible.
for your consideration,
scott lurndal
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jan 31 2000 - 21:00:15 EST