Re: [Usability] tools on the desktop

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>]

Le lundi 01 août 2005 à 12:01 +0100, Ross Burton a écrit :
> On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 20:30 -0400, Jason Hoover wrote:
> > Any distro worth it's weight in CD's has sync writes on by default for
> > removable/hot-plug volumes for that very reason.
> 
> Sync writes have the side effect of destroying Flash-based media as the
> system can't batch up writes.  I believe recent Ubuntu's have turned off
> sync mounts for some USB sticks for this reason.

sync supposed effect to kill flash media is a myth which has been
dismantled on linux kernel mailing list recently :)

The big problem people are seeing at the moment with latest linux kernel
is that "sync" has been correctly implemented in vfat (which is probably
most used FS for usb removable media), causing extremely slow operations
for any write attempt. Before that, sync was not working properly but
nobody really noticed. This is why this option was disabled in HAL cvs
and in most distributions, until a new option is implemented in Linux
kernel to flush caches really fast.

See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=157674

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
Mandriva