Re: the umount() saga for regular linux desktop users

[Greg Stark]

William <wh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> In my opinion, in order for linux to be trully user friendly, "a umount() 
> should NEVER fail" (even if the device containing the filesystem is no 
> longuer attached to the system). The kernel should do it's best to satisfy 
> the umount request and cleanup. Maybe the kernel could try some of the 
> following:

What you're asking for is for the umount -f option to be supported. This isn't
a new fangled idea. BSD supported has supported it since sometime in the last
millennium. Seriously, it's pretty basic functionality and really ought to be
supported.

The semantics of umount -f are simpler than you make it sound. It just
unmounts the file system normally and revokes any file descriptors for that
file system. Any further i/o on those file descriptors just gets an error
(EINVAL I expect). 

This is one of my biggest pet peeves about Linux.

-- 
greg

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/