Re: Problem with crash post-install [ was: Update or reinstall ]

[Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org>]

Greg Wooledge wrote: 
> <https://linux.die.net/man/8/sync> which says:
> 
>   On Linux, sync is only guaranteed to schedule the dirty blocks for
>   writing; it can actually take a short time before all the blocks are
>   finally written. The reboot(8) and halt(8) commands take this into
>   account by sleeping for a few seconds after calling sync(2).

There are situations in which it can take much longer than a few
seconds. They require a large amount of data to write and a slow
storage mechanism.

Specific example: recursive copying of music files to my USB-2
attached music player, which has an actual write speed of about
20 MB per second. The cp -r or rsync of a few gigabytes can
return well before the data is actually written.

-dsr-