Hi Christoph, Thanks for that quick response. On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 1:10 PM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 01:03:41PM +0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: >> The kernel keeps data in memory to avoid doing (relatively >> slow) disk reads and writes. This improves performance, but if >> the computer crashes, data may be lost or the file system cor??? >> rupted as a result. sync ensures that everything in memory is >> written to disk. > > This part looks correct. > >> sync should be called before the processor is halted in an >> unusual manner (e.g., before causing a kernel panic when debug??? >> ging new kernel code). In general, the processor should be >> halted using the shutdown(8) or reboot(8) or halt(8) commands, >> which will attempt to put the system in a quiescent state >> before calling sync(2). (Various implementations of these com??? >> mands exist; consult your documentation; on some systems one >> should not call reboot(8) and halt(8) directly.) > > This kind of information does not seem useful for a user of a command > line utility, and the last bit seems incorrect at least for Linux. Yes, I agree that that paragraph is borderline. I included it in case there was anything there to inspire an addition to sync(1). Anyway, your comment just makes me more sure that this page should be booted from man-pages. Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
