*BSD News Article 71310


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From: dan@dan.emsphone.com (Dan Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: "syncing disk...3 3" <- ?
Date: 18 Jun 1996 02:17:56 GMT
Organization: Executive Marketing Services, Inc.
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Message-ID: <4q53kk$rej@client2.news.psi.net>
References: <31C266F3.41C67EA6@uiuc.edu> <4pv38c$84e@uriah.heep.sax.de> <4q4g0g$s6@ennui.ops.best.com>
Reply-To: dnelson@emsphone.com (Dan Nelson)
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Ron Echeverri <rone@ennui.ops.best.com> wrote:
> In article <4pv38c$84e@uriah.heep.sax.de>,
> J Wunsch <joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de> wrote:
> >Vlad <roubtsov@uiuc.edu> wrote:
> >> 	Just curious: what are these numbers that appear after "syncing
> >> disk..." or whatever message when one does reboot ?
> >The number of outstanding buffers that need to be saved to the disk.
> 
> What about when you get three numbers (3 3 1 done) versus only two
> (3 3 done)?

When you ask the system to reboot, it sends a sync() call to the OS,
which tries to flush all the dirty buffers in the cache.  The numbers
are how many buffers are still dirty.  When the buffers are written,
BSD unmounts the disks and reboots.  If you have the kernal source,
check out /sys/i1386/i386/machdep.c, boot().

Try mounting a drive async, creating and removing a whole bunch of
files, and doing a 'reboot'.  You'll get numbers like 28 28 24 18 7,
then a reboot.

	-Dan Nelson
	dnelson@emsphone.com