dangerous situation with shutdown process

[Sergey N. Voronkov]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 04:17:06PM -0400, asym wrote:
> At 15:19 7/14/2005, Wilko Bulte wrote:
> >On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 12:14:49PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote..
> >> > Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 20:38:15 +0200
> >> > From: Anatoliy Dmytriyev <tolid at plab.ku.dk>
> >> > Sender: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> >> >
> >> > Hello, everybody!
> >> >
> >> > I have found unusual and dangerous situation with shutdown process:
> >> > I did a copy of 200 GB data on the 870 GB partition (softupdates is
> >> > enabled) by cp command.
> >> > It took a lot of time when I did umount for this partition exactly 
> >after
> >> > cp, but procedure finished correctly.
> >> > In case, if I did ???shutdown ???h(r)???, also exactly after cp, the 
> >shutdown
> >> > procedure waited for ???sync??? (umounting of the file system) but sync
> >> > process was terminated by  timeout, and fsck checked and did correction
> >> > of the file system after boot.
> >> >
> >> > System 5.4-stable, RAM 4GB, processor P-IV 3GHz.
> >> >
> >> > How can I fix it on my system?
> 
> The funny thing about all the replies here.. is that this guy is not saying 
> that sync doesn't work.
> 
> He's saying that the timeout built into shutdown causes it to *terminate* 
> the sync forcibly before it's done, and then reboot.
> 
> All finger pointing about IDE, SCSI, softupdates, and journals aside.. I 
> think all he wants/needs is a way to increase that timer.
> 

If you can't increase shutdown timeout, decrease softupdates timers.

# tail -3 /etc/sysctl.conf
kern.metadelay=14
kern.dirdelay=15
kern.filedelay=17

That was my solution for shutdown wait timeout.

Serg N. Voronkov,
Sibitex JSC,
Tyumen, Russia.