Removable storage devices and sync

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 17:20 +0200, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2004 at 11:19:38AM -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 
> > Nope, the point of mounting 'sync' is to ensure that all IO is done
> > synchronously to ensure that data is written to the disk in the event
> > that the user yanks out the device without properly unmounting it.
> 
> Yes, I know that. But why the different handling for large and small
> devices? Should not all external devices be mounted sync? I can
> pull out an external hard disk just as easy as an USB stick.
> 

Because 'sync' kills performance which is noticeable on USB harddisks
and not on USB sticks (flash memory is slow). In the future we will do
this using a combination of a) per device hal device information files;
and b) preferences coming from the logged in users settings.

Right now, looking at the size is the best heuristic we got, sorry.

David