[TUHS] sync; sync; sync; halt (was: Re: Illumos ))

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Tom Ivar Helbekkmo

    > There was no fancy I/O order juggling, so everything was written in the
    > same chronological order as it was scheduled.
    > ...
    > What this means is that the second sync, by waiting for its own
    > superblock writes, will wait until all the inode and file data flushes
    > scheduled by the first one have completed.

Ah, I'm not sure this is correct. Not all disk drivers handled requests in a
'first-come, first-served' order (i.e. where a request for block X, which was
scheduled before a request for block Y, actually happened before the
operation on block Y). It all depends on the particular driver; some drivers
(e.g. the RP driver) re-organized the waiting request queue to optimize head
motion, using a so-called 'elevator algorithm'.

(PS: For a good time, do "dd if=/dev/[large_partition] of=/dev/null" on a
running system with such a disk, and a lot of users on - the system will
apparently come to a screeching halt while the 'up' pass on the disk
completes... I found this out the hard way, needless to say! :-)

Since the root block is block 1 in the partition, one might think that even
with an elevator algorithm, this would tend to guarantee that doing it would
more or less guarantee that all other pending operations would have completed
(since it could only happen at the end of 'down' pass); _but_ the elevator
algorithm is in terms of actual physical block numbers, so blocks in another
lower partition might still remain to be written.

But now that I think about it a bit, if such blocks existed, that partition's
super-block would also need to be written, so when that one completed, the
disk queue would be empty.

But the point remains - because there's no guarantee of _overall_ disk
operation ordering in V6, scheduling a disk request and waiting for it to
complete does not guarantee that all previously-requested disk operations
will have completed before it does.


I really think the whole triple-sync thing is mythology. Look through the V6
documentation and although IIRC there are instructions on how to shut the
system down, it's not mentioned. We certainly never used it at MIT (and I
still don't), and I've never seen a problem with disk corruption _when the
system was deliberately shut down_.

	Noel