Pressing a button in Linux is too complicated

[Brian Kelsay]

Losing what is in the RAM cache would still be data loss and covered by my comment.

I have seen USB flash drives get corrupted by unplugging during data access.  Even right here on this list.

As you say, it would be nice if the CD-ROM drive button (CD-RW drive if a non-writeable media is inserted) would issue unmount and eject the disk.  Don't know if anyone is working on this.  I do recall a point where the feature was added to GUI filebrowsers and right-click menus to initiate a software eject command.  Somebody thought it was important or annoying that we couldn't do that in Linux.


Brian Kelsay

>>> Jonathan Hutchins <> 01/13/05 11:40AM >>>
On Thursday 13 January 2005 07:34 am, Brian Kelsay wrote:

> In order to streamline the OS, all drives are treated the same.  You can't
> pull a hotswap SCSI or eject a CD until it is unmounted.  You definitely
> don't want to eject a CD-R when you are in the middle of burning, so the
> burning process locks the drive.  If you remove a USB HDD or flash drive
> without unmounting, you risk data loss or corruption.

This is pretty easy to understand if you do a little bit of work with a 
floppy, which _can_ be ejected while it's still mounted.
<snip>
Stick it back in the original machine, unmount it.  Watch the blinkenlight.  
Oooh, that's it, it's writing the data from RAM cache to the disk!  
_That's_  why you have to unmount drives before you physically disconnect them!