Syncer "giving up" on buffers

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 10:53:43 +0200
> From: Jan Srzednicki <winfried at student.agh.edu.pl>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> 
> On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 07:53:48PM +0300, Lefteris Chatzibarbas wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I have a problem with kernels,  built the last couple of days, where
> > during shutdown syncer is "giving up" on buffers.  During the next boot
> > all filesystems are checked because of improper dismount.  Here follow
> > the exact messages I get:
> > 
> >   Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `vnlru' to stop...stopped
> >   Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `bufdaemon' to stop...stopped
> >   Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `syncer' to stop...stopped
> >   
> >   syncing disks, buffers remaining... 8 8 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 
> >   giving up on 6 buffers
> >   Uptime: 41m20s
> >   pfs_vncache_unload(): 1 entries remaining
> >   Shutting down ACPI
> >   Rebooting...
> > 
> > After some testing I found out that this does _not_ happen if I manually
> > unmount my ext2 filesystems, before shutting down.  In this case syncer
> > finishes without any problems.
> 
> I confirm that, same thing happened in my case. But, I had just one
> buffer remaining and ext2fs mounted in read-only. It seems that it's not
> so read-only then..

While this seems to impact ext2fs system, the issue of syncer failing
on read-only volumes is also showing up in cases where ext2fs systems
are not present. See reports over the past couple of days on this.

I can't be sure that these are the same problem, but they sure do look
like the same thing.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634