giving up on 1 buffers error messsage

[Siddharth Aggarwal]

syncing disks... 54 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 giving up on 1 
buffers


Hi,

I am referring to the message when the code in kern_shutdown.c in bsd 
4.10 is called at the time of boot() system call

My understanding is that this message tells us that 1 buffer from the 
buffer cache was not successfully flushed to disk, since the last call to 
sync(). Is that right? In that case what happens to this buffer? Is it 
discarded and assume that fsck will fix this on reboot? 

Since the syncer process runs periodically, can this error message be 
avoided if we wait long enough to guarantee flushing to disk (I have tried 
with DELAYS upto 30 seconds but I still get the error sometimes). 

I am actually trying to use this same code at a different point in time 
(not during shutdown, but to take a checkpoint), so I am not sure if that 
contributes to this error message?