Hello, On Fri, 10 May 2013 22:47:01 -0400 Curt Howland <howl...@priss.com> wrote:
> It seems logical to me that there would be a way to say "sync > immediately" or "do not buffer", so that when the drive was > inactive it could be yanked without danger of corruption. IMHO the core of the problem is not in the caching / buffering / syncing, but in the fact that the OS has no way of knowing *when* exactly you are going to yank the device out. So at the very moment when you are pushing your fingers against the thumb and pulling it out, a writing operation spanning few seconds might start and there is no way of ensuring it would not break the integrity of the filesystem or the files on it. By the act of unmounting, ejecting or however you call it, you are telling OS that you are about to do that and by showing a message "it is safe to disconnect...", OS is telling you that, well, it is safe to yank the thing out as OS has already removed access to it from all programs. So even disabling buffering does not solve the problem completely, it only shrinks the time when your device is in unsafe mode to minimum. Extent to how is this successful heavily depends on your use of the drive: e.g. if you use it for office docs that you edit from thumb, the unsafe time will probably shrink from seconds to miliseconds per minute, but if you are running a bittorrent client, it might not help at all. (It could actually do more harm by shortening the drive lifetime.) So if there is a solution, it's in warning the OS. Here we could fancy about body heat detectors that would not work if you pulled the drive using cable attached string, or light detectors, which would not work in dark, et cetera et cetera... aL. -- Alois Mahdal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130511194725.22cb2...@hugo.daonet.home
