Hi,
On Wed, 16 Feb 2000 09:45:10 -0500, "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>
said:
> First, sorry for yelling earlier. I'm conscious of problems with PC
> floppies. Calling block_fsync() regulary is not even a solution, I'm
> aware of this as well - too much overhead for not so much. But a
> newbie is not as stupid to eject a floppy when he sees the LED is on
> (well, at least I hope so :)
> Right. That was the basic design behind supermount, as I understand
> it. Users have been well programmed that if the LED light is off, it's
> safe to pop the disk out. Because Linux normally has different rules,
> this violates the principal of least surprise.
Exactly. The two things supermount was designed to ensure were:
1) All blocks are flushed to disk and the filesystem remounted readonly
as soon as there are no more files open for write on the medium; and
2) supermount "overlays" its own directories on top of the directory
inodes owned by the underlying filesystem, so that even if you have
"cd"ed to a supermounted filesystem, you can still safely remove the
medium.
> So the question is whether it's possible to do something relatively
> painless which allows the right thing to happen under most
> circumstances.
These two things appear to be the Right Thing as far as naive users are
concerned. The real problem is how to do it cleanly.
> By the way, ext2 has a serial number, so it *would* be possible to
> make ext2 check the superblock parameter when it was informed that a
> media change may have happened. So it's not just the FAT filesystem
> that can do this.
--Stephen
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