From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Jan 17 22:30:58 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6150416A4CE for ; Sat, 17 Jan 2004 22:30:58 -0800 (PST) Received: from gw.catspoiler.org (217-ip-163.nccn.net [209.79.217.163]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8D50143D60 for ; Sat, 17 Jan 2004 22:30:53 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from truckman@FreeBSD.org) Received: from FreeBSD.org (mousie.catspoiler.org [192.168.101.2]) by gw.catspoiler.org (8.12.9p2/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i0I6Ud7E052537; Sat, 17 Jan 2004 22:30:43 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from truckman@FreeBSD.org) Message-Id: <200401180630.i0I6Ud7E052537@gw.catspoiler.org> Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2004 22:30:39 -0800 (PST) From: Don Lewis To: fs@FreeBSD.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/plain; charset=us-ascii cc: mckusick@beastie.mckusick.com Subject: "giving up on N buffers" revisited X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2004 06:30:58 -0000 I think there is another cause for the "giving up on N buffers" problems besides the fsck'ing the root partition in single user mode problem that I fixed and the mounted ext2fs file system problem that has not been fixed. I occasionally run into this problem if I reboot too quickly after doing make installworld mergemaster My file systems are mounted with soft-updates enabled. My suspicion is that the syncer thread is getting disabled before its worklist is empty and the remaining dirty bufs can't be immediately flushed in the kernel shutdown code due to dependencies. Mergemaster would have a tendency to trigger this because it nukes its temproot tree just before it exits. Waiting a little while before rebooting gives the syncer time to do some cleanup before it gets shut down.