Subject: Weird IDE block devices problem

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 10:28:05 +0100

Hi !

Samuel Rydth (the author of Mac-On-Linux) sent me the following message.
This sound weird since it looks like order is not enforced by the IDE
block driver. Is this normal or is this a kernel bug ? I beleive it
happened with  2.2.10-2.2.13 kernels (I have to confirm this).

On Sun, Dec 12, 1999, Samuel Rydh <[email-masked]> wrote:

---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ----------------
Btw. I found an oddity with the IDE block device interface
(causes problems with DropStuffit in MacOS 9). In a sequence like

	write	A to sector N
	write	B to sector N
	read	     sector N

then the read might not return the information "B" (but something
else). I've always assumed that the block device drivers were 
supposed to enforce this consistency but I might be wrong. Everything 
work as it should if an extra "fsync" is inserted after each
write. This might impact driver performance though.

----------------- End Forwarded Message -----------------

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