sync() in 2.6.38.5

[Paul Anderson <pha@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

2.6.38.5 (x64 intel, in todays case a 40TiByte SAN volume) appears to
have a bug whereby not all active metadata will be flushed even on a
quiescent machine (one that has nonetheless in the past been under
very high load).

We have tried several variations of clean shutdowns, combined with for
example the "echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" trick to no avail - we
still get lost files (well, 0 length files).

We have several big servers scheduled to go down shortly, and I was
wondering if there are other ideas besides just coping all recent data
to another server.

Thanks,

Paul