sporadic disk syncing failures when shutting down

[Jeff Walters]

On Saturday 12 July 2003 11:24 pm, Sean Kelly wrote:

> > syncing disks, buffers remaining... 54 54 54 54 54 54 54 54 54 54 54 54
> > 54 54 54 54 54 54 54 54 giving up on 54 buffers
> > Uptime: 6m42s
> > Terminate ACPI
> > Rebooting...
> >
> > Each time this has happened, fsck finds and nukes a bunch of empty
> > directories.  The last time this happened, the /etc/rc.d/yp* files that
> > mergmaster updated were missing after the reboot and fsck had done its
> > work.  Nothing has ever shown up in lost+found.
> >
> > Has anyone else seen this?
>
> I have seen this a lot, but not as much lately. Sadly, I don't have any
> more data than you on why it happens. I've seen it give up on a rather
> frighteningly large number of buffers before, though...

I hate to even mentioned such an unscientific observation where I made 
multiple changes at once, but I'll provide a data point.  I also saw this 
problem crop up at the same time as I tried the SCHED_ULE scheduler a couple 
of months ago.  I re-cvsup'ed CURRENT and switched back to SCHED_4BSD and it 
went away.