mkinitrd troubles -- needs "sync"?

[Matthew Miller <mattdm mattdm org>]

I am fairly frequently running into a problem where mkinitrd generates empty
images. (They're about 12k, with no contents.) I can find no rhyme or reason
to when this fails, and if you give -v, everything _looks_ to be fine -- but
sometimes it isn't.

And it's not just mkinitrd -- I experienced the same thing the other day
trying to rebuild anaconda on FC3 -- that initrd was ending up empty (even
though its tree seemed to be created fine, and the log of the build _says_
everything is copied in -- when the actual file is made, it's empty.

But sometimes it works just fine. Rebooting seems to usually make it work for a while
too, but that may be a red herring.

I'm seeing this _a lot_, yet I can't really find it in bugzilla. Am I going
crazy, here?

Out of superstition, I'm going to add a "sync; sleep 3" before the umount in
the mkinitrd script... that shouldn't be necessary, should it?

... time passes ....

HEY! It seems to work fine _every time_ so far once I've done that!!!

Anyone care to comment?


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm mattdm org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>