Giving up on x buffers - losing files

[Don Lewis]

On 28 Jun, Kalev Lember wrote:
> Arjan van Leeuwen wrote:
> 
>> <snip>
>>
>> Sometimes, particularly after doing a lot of file writes (i.e. 
>> compiling a  lot of ports, building world and mergemastering, etc), I 
>> get the 'Giving  up on x buffers' message on shutdown, and my 
>> filesystems come up dirty  when I restart.
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> So, why does this happen? And how do I prevent it from happening? 
>> This  definitely does _not_ sound like something I want my servers to 
>> do when  5.x goes -STABLE.
> 
> Not sure if it is related, but if I have ext2 mounted on shutdown, the 
> syncer also fails and gives up on a few buffers. It is reproducable. I 
> can recall it was fixed about a year ago, but then broke again.

This is an unrelated bug that has also been discussed.  I believe it
even affects read-only mounts of ext2 file systems.