Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 11:38:43 -0700 (PDT) From: dpk <dpk@dpk.net> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Syncing disks, buffers remaining - value increases? Message-ID: <20050801112812.C79761@shared10.hosting.flyingcroc.net>
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Sorry for all the questions to the list, we're having a number of issues deploying FreeBSD 5.4 and we're trying to get an understanding of what we're seeing. When I reboot these servers (using "reboot" on the command line), it will go through the usual routine I'm familiar with from FreeBSD 4.x, but when it goes to the "syncing disks" phase, sometimes it will do something like this: Syncing disks, buffers remaining ... 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 Eventually it gives up on 1 or so buffers. When the server comes back up, it gives warnings that the partitions were all improperly dismounted. Is it normal for the number of buffers remaining to actually increase while shutting down? I'm looking at the kernel source and the loop that performs these syncs appears pretty small. Could something else still be running on the server that is trying to write to disk, even while in the shutdown phase? I guess it would only be able to run "interrupt threads", judging by the comments, while it releases Giant. It may be a coincidence, but on a few occasions, the background fsck may have still been running when the reboot was issued. I've assumed that since fsck now runs in the background that it must be able to gracefully handle reboots. FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p5, Dual proc Xeons (varying speed), varying memory, PAE+SMP kernels, 3ware RAID cards (varying capacity, RAID levels).
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