From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Jun 26 17:13:45 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BD47516A4CE for ; Sat, 26 Jun 2004 17:13:45 +0000 (GMT) Received: from winston.piwebs.com (217-19-20-186.dsl.cambrium.nl [217.19.20.186]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 5BADC43D31 for ; Sat, 26 Jun 2004 17:13:44 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from avleeuwen@piwebs.com) Received: (qmail 4846 invoked from network); 26 Jun 2004 17:13:38 -0000 Received: from vincent.piwebs.com (HELO localhost) (192.168.0.84) by winston.piwebs.com with SMTP; 26 Jun 2004 17:13:38 -0000 Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 19:14:22 +0200 To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org From: "Arjan van Leeuwen" Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; delsp=yes; charset=us-ascii MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: User-Agent: Opera M2/7.52 (FreeBSD, build 724) Subject: Giving up on x buffers - losing files X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 17:13:45 -0000 I've had this problem for a long time with 5.x, but it doesn't seem to happen that often. Today it bit me hard. Sometimes, particularly after doing a lot of file writes (i.e. compiling a lot of ports, building world and mergemastering, etc), I get the 'Giving up on x buffers' message on shutdown, and my filesystems come up dirty when I restart. This wouldn't be such an enormous problem, if it wouldn't always erase the files I changed most recently. The files are simply reduced to 0 bytes. My configuration files for Opera and KDE have been victim to this more than once (because Opera writes to the file on exit, for example), but today, it was /etc/master.passwd that was reduced to 0 bytes (because I had just changed something in it). I understand that turning of write caching might improve the situation, but it also makes my system a lot slower, and I don't like that on my desktop system. So, why does this happen? And how do I prevent it from happening? This definitely does _not_ sound like something I want my servers to do when 5.x goes -STABLE. Arjan