It is a standard part of the kernel, all the drivers that deal with removable
disk media lock the media in the drive if they can. Only after the device
has been fsync()ed is the disk unlocked. There were some subtle bugs in
this support in the 1.2 kernels, but this was fixed long ago.
> This should also extend to hard disks that have gone south, which was the
> problem the original poster was experiencing.
If a *device* vanishes - by being unplugged for instance - there's really
nothing the kernel can do - it most likely has cached pages for that device
which it cannot dispose of. This is what causes the deadlocks.
Floppies aside, removable media are well understood and dealt with correctly,
but this has nothing to do with dead devices.
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Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net
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