Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3605 mails)

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 23:22 -0400, John E. Perry wrote:
> The lights stay on except while writing on all three of mine.  I've been
> running "sync" to clear all write buffers before I removed mine, since
> 10.0 (now at 10.1).  Does this not work as I understood it?  Is it now
> unnecessary, as some of these posts seem to have implied?

Yes.  Most newer kernel support is aware of removable EEPROM storage.
They know to synchronize write buffers immediately.  So sync is rather
redundant _except_ as a prompt verification that the write has been
completed.

I.e., the buffers are being flushed _immediately_ for removable EEPROM
storage, _regardless_ of whether you run "sync" or not.  All "sync"
gives you now is a pause before a return prompt until the buffers are
flushed (possibly a slight added priority -- but not likely anything
significant).

Furthermore, the UDF filesystem -- unlike most random access block
filesystems such as FAT, NTFS, Ext2/3, etc... -- was designed with
[re-]writable, removable media in mind (among other benefits UDF offers,
such as versus ISO9660 for read-only/pre-mastering).  So if your
removable storage uses UDF, instead of FAT32, it has extra protections.

Now I don't know how much of UDF is completely implemented in the Linux
kernel 2.4 and 2.6 implementation -- but Linux's UDF certainly better
than the minimalistic and read-only implementation in Windows XP, or
most of the bundled UDF write drivers these days.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith        Professional, technical annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx  http://thebs413.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------------
Illegal Immigration = "Representation Without Taxation"



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