Re: sync() broken for raw devices in 2.4.x??

 Thanks, Andi. In which case sync() for direct buffered block
 device access would seem to be broken in 2.4.0-prerelease.

 stewart

On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Andi Kleen wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 01, 2001 at 07:50:31PM -0500, [e-mail] wrote:
> > 
> >  I have a sync()/fdatasync() intensive application that is designed to work
> >  on both raw files and raw partitions. Today I upgraded my kernel to the
> >  new pre-release and found that my benchmark program would no longer finish
> >  when handed a raw partition. I've written a small Java program (my app is
> >  in Java) which demonstrates the bug. Make foo.dat a raw scsi partition to
> >  re-produce. In my case it's "mknod foo.dat b 8 18". 
> 
> Just a minor correction: this is not a raw partition, but a buffered blockdevice.
> If you want a real rawdevice (where sync is a noop because all IO goes
> synchronously to disk) you need to bind a character raw device to the
> block device first using the raw util.
> 
> >From a quick look sync_buffers() [which implements fsync on block devices]
> has not changed significantly between 2.2 and 2.4 and uses the same algorithm.
> 
> -Andi
>