On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Richard Stallman wrote:
> The floppy drive normally has a light on it which says when the drive
> is spinning. If each person waits for the drive to stop spinning
> before removing a floppy, then with suitably written software the file
> system will never be damaged by removing a floppy.
Hmm, isn't a fs mounted with "-o sync" plus an automounter (autofs, for
example) unmounting a floppy after a short (such as a few seconds) timeout
sufficient? This way you have both the floppy cached and coherent.
Actually removing an ext2 floppy before unmounting would need a later fsck
(due to a stale "dirty" flag in the superblock) but the filesystem would
be otherwise consistent anytime the light is off. For fat floppies there
would not even be a need for fsck.
Of course you need to teach distributors to place the "sync" option for
floppy drives in "fstab" but this is not a kernel issue. Unless the
"sync" support is broken for a filesystem.
-- + Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland + +--------------------------------------------------------------+ + e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available +- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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