On Friday 03 March 2006 11:23 am, Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Thursday 2006-03-02 at 21:03 -0500, James Knott wrote:
Actually, I agree with SuSE: mounting "sync" is the correct thing to do with automounted pluggable drives.
The user could unplug the device before the kernel has even decided it's time to write to it.
If a drive takes an incredibly long time to write to, a user may just give up in frustration and unplug it anyway. If SUSE insists on using sync, they'd better find a way to make it usable. I have a 1 GB pen drive. I do not want to wait such a long time to write to it. Right now my choices are to manually mount it or plug it into my notebook, booted into Windows, and pull the file over the network.
I understand your frustration, but the proper "Linux way of things" is to manually mount things, IMO.
Ewww! Who would want to do that? <serious mode> I can imagine that - for the hardcore geeky type who still thinks of the CLI as a usable interface - this might be a good option. However, the rest of us want - no, expect - the drive to be available for writing and reading seconds after plugging it in.
The kernel can buffer the content that is going to be sent to a device, and actually wait a long time before writing it - several seconds is normal, but it could be way more. It is very possible for a user to unplug the device before writing is finished. However, when you issue the command "umount", this doesn't return till all writing has finished, and is really safe to remove the device.
SuSE decision - if it is SuSE's - to use the option "sync" is the proper thing to do for automounted devices. If this makes the device very slow, the problem lies in the kernel developers field, not in SuSE's.
Then, if you modify the scripts so that it doesn't use "sync", that's your decision and you know what it involves: waiting for a prudential time before unplugging. Or, simply mount manually.
Actually, it won't let you close the Konqueror window until it has stopped writing, so there's no issue, AFAIK. -- kai - www.perfectreign.com www.livebeans.com - the new NetBeans community