A minor problem w/ access to my flash drive

[Pozsar Balazs]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 10:42:50AM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> You have to unmount, sorry, it's unsafe to just removing the device
> backing a mounted file system. While HAL can cope this with (as far
> as the kernel can) by playing all sorts of lazy unmount tricks it's
> still not safe in many ways. If you google around, you'll find the
> same comments about Windows and Mac OS X - the former OS decided
> to remove the modal "unsafe device removal" dialog, while the latter
> does put it up.

Well, it maybe offtopic on this list, but anyway:
I think it should be made safe to just simply remove a removeable device 
(just like its name suggests :).
I think two main problems should be solved:
 - There should be a "sync"-like mount option which should write data to 
   disk asap, _but_ without wearing the device, eg writing sectors only 
   once. (I _think_ supermount-ng does this, but I'm not 100% sure.)
 - There should be a "hard" umount option. Not lazy mount option which 
   keeps fd-s open, which has the effect of keeping the mountpoint in 
   the background which has the effect of keeping the device open, but a 
   real hard one which just lets the mountpoint and the device go 
   immediately.


As a side note, I'd like to tell that I mount my usb devices with 
supermount-ng (using a hal device.d script), and just unplug them 
without umount. I've never lost data, so I think it works. I do not 
understand why cannot it go into mainline kernel.


-- 
pozsy
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