Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 10:10:53 +0000 (GMT) From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk> To: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: 4-STABLE, vmware2 delaying fsync indefinitely? Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0111011009230.17249-100000@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk>
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Recently the behaviour of vmware on my 4-STABLE machine has altered; I'm not sure if this classes as a bug or not, so I'm soliciting opinions. Symptoms: vmware runs as normal. (I've got WinNT under it.) These days, vmware2-2.0.3.799_1 will exit immediately if I suspend and exit the program (prior to _1, it synced status to disk). However, I was slightly concerned when I came to shut down FreeBSD; the external drive (which the VMWare virtual disk occupies) went into several minutes of activity at the point where it was being unmounted. This seemed odd; I've since done a bit of experimenting and the activity can be triggered after exiting vmware (at pretty much an arbitrary length of time) by fsyncing * in the vmware external directory. There's quite a bit of memory in this machine (378MB) - my question is this: is this a late flushing of mmapped pages marked dirty, or does this behavior occur even if the pages were not touched? - And shouldn't those pages (if dirty) be flushed to disk in a "reasonable" amount of time*, rather than hanging around for (in one case) two weeks? Cheers, jan * sync(2) doesn't cause the flush; fsync(1 or 2) will. -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk Whenever I see a dog salivate I get an insatiable urge to ring a bell. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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