Re: GNOME Shell can't unmount my USB key
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On Mon, Feb 08, 2016 at 01:50:59PM -0800, Patrick Bartek wrote:
> On Mon, 08 Feb 2016, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
[...]
> > This seems like *very* bad advice. The system keeps a cache[1] of the
> > data in the USB and flushes this cache only from time to time (that's
> > what makes accesses to the otherwise slow USB pretty fast).
>
> Perhaps in days gone by: my OS prior to Wheezy -- Fedora 12 --
> was like that. Anything USB had to be mounted/unmounted manually.
> What a pain. And if you unplugged without unmounting . . . Yes, things
> could break. But with Wheezy which I've been using for 3+ years have
> had no problems with just plug/unplug. The only precaution is to check
> the drive activity light isn't flickering.
Most definitely not. You have just been lucky. As long as a file system
is mounted, the OS is free to keep changed information in RAM, and
flushes it whenever convenient. If you pull the device out while those
changes haven't been flushed, you have data loss. If those changes
concern file system structural information... your file system is
thrashed. File systems with a journal are more robust wrt. to that
event, but the data which was in RAM hasn't made it to the stick.
You have been lucky because basically, if there is I/O bandwidth left,
the flushing happens relatively quickly. But I wouldn't count on
that.
> Of course, my install of Wheezy is very custom and minimal: for the GUI
> just a window manager, Openbox. And I custom wrote my own udev rules
> for handling USB devices -- thumb drives, cell phones, eBook reader,
> etc.
That doesn't change anything.
> But a regular desktop should be set up to do the same thing,
> safely.
That's why the desktops have this thingy to "remove the device safely",
which under the hood does an unmount.
> If the OP's GNOME Shell is not doing this, but other desktops are, then
> GNOME might be the problem.
See above.
regards
- -- tomás
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