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Date:      Thu, 7 Mar 2002 16:09:57 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Bug? still looking, yet to knock up small test case. Suggestions  solicited.
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.44.0203071601370.13361-100000@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk>

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Something odd seems to be happening; I'd appreciate "look here"
suggestions. I suspect mmapped pages aren't being flushed but gawd alone
knows why.

Situation: vmware2, with a "fake disk", files in the /external FS
(/external/vmware1/nt1.*).

FBSD-stable. Behaviour's been like this for quite some time (since
around 4.3-release, I think)

Symptoms: run vmware, launch NT in virtual machine, blah, blah. Suspend
the virtual machine.

Former behaviour went like this: reports "synchronising disk status" (or
imilar) and flushes memory contents to disk. (Irritatingly, one time in
20, this still happens.)

Behaviour these days: vmware suspends immediately, and exits normally.

However, the contents of the nt1.* files _aren't_ flushed, and stay
unflushed for an open-ended period of time (days, weeks). sync(2)s don't
make any change on this; umounting the FS will take several minutes as the
contents are flushed to disk.

fsyncing the appropriate files causes them to be flushed.

Shouldn't the file contents be getting written back out within some
finite time period? The system's not under tremendous load (it's a
desktop workstn most of the time).

Note: this doesn't result in ultimately broken behaviour, because those
pages are eventually flushed on orderly shutdown. I'm just curious as to
why sync(2) isn't forcing this.

Cheers,
jan

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
Ceci n'est pas une pipe |


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