On Wed, 29 Jul 1998, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jul 1998, Stefan Traby wrote:
> >
> > BTW: A drive following the SCSI-specs may cause disk-corruption
> > under Linux (WCE=1). Data may still be in write-cache after
> > shutdown and power-off. (I miss "synchronize cache").
> > This is for shure a theoretical problem, but a practical bug.
> > Or did I miss something ?
>
> No, you didn't miss anything.
>
> The thing has been discussed occasionally (very occasionally), and I don't
> know what the proper response is. According to some people the better
> drives make sure that they have enough rotational energy that they can
> make sure they get their data written out even after powerdown, but
> personally that sounds like science fiction to me (oh, I wouldn't be
> surprised if there are some drives that do it, but I'd be surprised if
> it's universal).
>
> Of course, Linux itself won't ever shut off the power, so it's more a
> matter of "when can you safely say 'System halted.'" than anything else.
> The kernel does support some shutdown features, but the disk is not on
> that list.
>
> Linus
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html