I always take it for granted, but forgot to mention, you should also use O_DIRECT to bypass the linux buffer cache. It often gets in the way of error propagation since it is changing your io requests into it's own page sized ios and will also "lie" to you about having written your data in the first place since it's a write back cache. The point is you have to disable all the caches everywhere or the error information will get absorbed by the caches. - Mike -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>