dangerous situation with shutdown process

[Matthias Buelow]

Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> writes:

>buffers to disk.  While it is doing that, it displays the
>number of remaining buffers, with increasing time intervals
>between them.  If there are still buffers left after a
>certain number of intervals without change, the kernel
>gives up.

Why is it doing this? Can't it just enumerate the buffers and write
them, one by one?

mkb.