How to Sync properly ?

[David Woodhouse]

pallaire at gameloft.com said:
>  If I want to move a file from a ram drive to the flash, I will issue
> a 'mv' command followed by a 'sync' command. Sometime it will be
> updated but sometime it wont !!! 'sync' should not return until the
> flash is updated ? no ? 

> To see what was happening I added some printk in the driver, in the
> delete and write ! I saw some stranges behaviour. After a 'mv',
> sometimes the sync command does not do any things, sometime I see
> somes delteting and writing of buffers but not all of the blocks ...
> the remaining block will be written to the flash in a delay from 1 to
> 5 mintutes later ... and sometime the sync work fine !!! 

What file system? If you're using a 'normal' filesystem on the mtdblock 
device, you shouldn't expect it to be reliable. 

Linux stupidly just assumes that block devices never do any write caching, 
and a sync request is therefore never passed to the block device driver. 

--
dwmw2