Matthias Buelow wrote:
Chuck Swiger wrote:
Yet you seem willing to spend time discussing the matter...?
Because it's somewhat of my pet peeve and I always see the mantra-like
repetition of the argument that "you have to disable the write-back
cache if you want any safety at all",
No, there are other possible solutions which have been mentioned.
I reiterate my question: have you tried adjusting the syncer sysctl's and
seeing whether FreeBSD is more stable in the event of a power failure?
[ ... ]
One often sees the "softupdates" argument being fielded by FreeBSD
advocates, typically against Linux users with journalled fs, on web
forums, usenet and other less authoritative (and knowledgable)
places of discussion, and it is often presented as if it were some
kind of magic bullet that makes filesystem corruption impossible.
"Often?" Strawman test: can you point out 3 examples by message-id or URL?
A Google search finds them quickly:
http://www.heise.de/ix/foren/go.shtml?read=1&msg_id=7335045&forum_id=70615
(german, argument is that "softupdates is at least a match for a
journalled fs"),
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2003-June/009967.html
("FS + SoftUpdates is much better than journaling!")
http://aussatz.antville.org/topics/HowTos/
(german, argument is "1. practically nothing can break when power
goes out", and even that you can switch off the machine without any
problems, except for losing the files that have been written to in
the last seconds. Of course no mentioning of disk cache or any
sophistication whatever.)
Conclusion: if you're looking for unbridled FreeBSD advocacy on these lists or
in the FreeBSD documentation, you've found very little. A one-line post from
2003: gosh, someone expressed a strong opinion, and even that was promptly
followed up with:
FFS+SU does have the disadvantages that a full fsck is still needed
(run in the background), and you risk losing the last `sysctl
kern.metadelay` seconds worth of files written just before a crash.
...by Dan Nelson.
I'm going to skip the rest of the monologue and the Dubai Nad al-Sheba golf
club as well, but thanks anyway.
--
-Chuck
_______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
