[Wolves] Hooray SuSE is back

[Simon Morris]

David Goodwin wrote:
>  > One such bug is that OpenSUSE10 mounts FAT devices with the sync
>  > option which means that writing to iPods, USB disks, Digital cameras
>  > is unusably slow
>
> I'd have thought the sync issue is a good feature - as it means you can
> safely remove the media when ever writing completes, instead of what I
> find at moment (with Ubuntu) that I have to wait a few seconds after
> asking it to umount via Nautilus (icon disappears etc, but it's still
> writing to the media)
>

Well firstly I am no expert on this but I researched it fairly deeply
when I realised I had the problem and this is what I found.

* sync is a good thing(tm) as it means that all writes are flushed
from the kernel and written to disk ASP

* If you pull a USB disk out of your machine the chances of data
corruption are less if you have it mounted with sync

* sync is a bad thing(tm) as it takes f*%king ages to write files to
these kind of devices as the kernel has to do a write operation for
small chunks of data rather than buffer them up and do one write
operation for a large chunk

* sync trashes devices that only have a limited number of IO
operations in their lifespan [0]. So sync is a bad thing as it may
literally kill your USB pen stick with excessive writes

* There [is/was] as kernel bug with mounting vfat devices where sync
doesn't actually write all the data synchronously anyway [1]

* It's mentioned as a bug in OpenSUSE, so I hope it gets fixed in the
next version [2]

Call me a wild crazy fool but in the mornings before I head to work I
sync my podcasts to my iPod by remounting it with the nosync option -
hasn't bitten me yet

Cheers!

~sm

[0] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-May/msg01859.html
[1] https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/8693
[2] https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=105871#c12