Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (6210 mails)

[Jorge Fábregas <fabregasj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 20 October 2005 5:57 pm, Randall R Schulz wrote:
>  The only reason to sync before shutting down is because the 
> root file system cannot be unmounted.

I really never thought about this until now that you mention it. It's logic 
ok. However, I gave /etc/init.d/halt a look and there are two lines almost at 
the end:

mount -no remount,ro / 2> /dev/null
sync

One would think (I did) that the / filesystem was unmounted and now it's being 
"remounted" read-only, which isn't the case. It's just the syntax of the 
command and its options that will make you think that. 

My question really is:  why the sync command after the drive being mounted 
read-only?  Isn't that  a contradiction (to put it read-only, and the perform 
the sync command? Or is it that the "read-only" option doesn't  apply for the 
actual writing of dirty pages  to disk? 

Just food for thought...

Thanks,
Jorge