Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2004 13:17:22 -0500 From: Jon Noack <noackjr@alumni.rice.edu> To: Don Lewis <truckman@FreeBSD.org> Cc: avleeuwen@piwebs.com Subject: Re: Giving up on x buffers - losing files Message-ID: <40DF0F32.3060001@alumni.rice.edu> In-Reply-To: <200406270439.i5R4cxQw064263@gw.catspoiler.org> References: <200406270439.i5R4cxQw064263@gw.catspoiler.org>
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On 06/26/04 23:38, Don Lewis wrote: > On 26 Jun, Arjan van Leeuwen wrote: >> Sometimes, particularly after doing a lot of file writes (i.e. >> compiling a lot of ports, building world and mergemastering, etc), >> I get the 'Giving up on x buffers' message on shutdown, and my >> filesystems come up dirty when I restart. >> >> <snip> >> >> So, why does this happen? And how do I prevent it from happening? >> This definitely does _not_ sound like something I want my servers >> to do when 5.x goes -STABLE. > > I've mentioned this a couple of times on this list in the last six > months or so. The last time was in the last couple of weeks. I can > reliably trigger this problem with mergemaster. > > I'm pretty sure that the problem relates to soft updates and how the > file system syncer is shut down, which leaves unresolved dependencies > that keep a number of dirty blocks from being flushed to disk at the > end of the system shutdown. > > I have some ideas on how to fix the problem, but I haven't had the > time to work on it and nobody else has stepped up with a fix. > > I am able to reliably work around the problem by running the sync > command and waiting a short while after running mergemaster and > before shutting down or rebooting the machine. If you're running X be sure to end your session instead of restarting directly. I usually end the session, switch to a console, manually sync as Don described, wait 30 seconds, manually sync again (just to be sure), and then shutdown. Actually, I wrote a script to do it (sync; sleep 30; sync; shutdown -r now). I only had the problem a couple times, but never since starting to manually sync. On a more humorous note, trying to save time by restarting both your NFS server and client workstation at the same time is a really bad idea, especially when your home directory is NFS mounted... ;-) Jon
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