Re: PATCH: Shutdown IDE before powering off.

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Thu Jan 22 2004 - 16:09:08 EST


James H. Cloos Jr. wrote:
"John" == John Bradford <john@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:


This spins down the disk(s) when you're just doing do a reboot.
That's fairly irritating and could affect reboot times if one has
many disks.


John> I think it is an attempt to force some broken drives to flush
John> their cache, but I wonder whether it will simply move the
John> problem from one set of broken drives to another :-).

It will. I've had to work with a few drives or drive combos over
the years that would not spin up reliably. It was vital to keep
them spinning once they were (all) up. Adding this would make
reboot unnecessarily unuseable in such cases. Perhaps just
flush, pause, flush would work as well?


Flush is what is needed, flush is what it does in 2.4, and flush is what it should do in 2.6 :)

Rebooting does not shut down nor unload the IDE driver, so it is -critical- that a flush occurs before reboot, otherwise it is entirely possible that writes the drive has ack'd back to the OS will not actually get written to the media.

Jeff



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