dangerous situation with shutdown process

[asym]

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.