Subject: Re: df require_sync (fwd)

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 96 22:28 PDT

From: [email-masked] (Kai Henningsen)
> He seems to say that a sync is often bad, especially on Linux (and indeed,  
> the latest fileutils seems to claim it doesn't sync by default, if I  
> understand the announcement), but then he talks about different defaults  
> for Debian.
> Is it possible that he thinks we _want_ sync?!

Systems that use statfs() for "df" would not need the sync() here.
Statfs() uses the kernel structures of mounted disks to get the necessary
information.

If a "df" implementation knows about the superblocks of various filesystems
and uses that information right off the disk, then you'd need to sync().
Hopefully we're long beyond that.

	Thanks

	Bruce