On Saturday 29 July 2006 11:11, n0dalus wrote:
On 7/29/06, Anne Wilson <cannewilson(a)tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> Selecting 'Safely Remove' starts lots of flickering on the pen-drive and
> the laptop, but the icon remains, no mount or umount appears on the
> right-click menu, and the drive can be opened in konqueror from the
> right-click menu - obviously not umounted.
Sounds like a feature to me. Flash devices are mounted 'async' by
default, so data written to them gets stored in the kernel for a short
amount of time before 'syncing' and writing to the device; this way
series of changes can be combined into single writes, saving the
finite write cycles on the device. The 'Safely Remove' option probably
pushes any remaining changes out of the kernel onto the device, and
once there is no write activity remaining it is quite safe to remove
the device even though it's still mounted.
I'm not happy with that idea. IAUI, 'Safely Remove' should flush the
cache (I
presume that's the activity seen) and then umount it. It certainly does on
my FC4 boxes. I do not like the idea of wrenching a mounted device, and the
only other alternative is to wait until the laptop is shutdown.
Anne