Re: SoftUpdates on /
> -Original Message- > From: Brian T. Schellenberger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: 21 February 2003 09:53 > To: Alistair Phillips; FreeBSD Questions > Subject: Re: SoftUpdates on / > > > > > On Friday 21 February 2003 08:10 am, Alistair Phillips wrote: > | Hi guys, > > | > | So I enabled SoftUpdates when I was busy with FDISK at the install > | time and now it seems like it may have been a bad idea. Now I know > | 4GB is not much but it seems that there is no more space left. And > | at times df -h will tell me there is -180MB available on / > ! [ Dont > | get me wrong here, I am > | not saying that SoftUpdates is causing me lack of space. ] > > > Softupdates don't take up any more or less space than not > having them; > just have "too much stuff" installed. > > Softupdates can cause *transient" failures to find space, but if you > still have too little space after five minutes, then softupdates has > nothing to do with it. > > And softupdates work much *better* on large partitions than > small ones; > with a 4G partition the transient space loss problem is virtually > non-existant; the reason that they disabled by default on / is almost > certainly because the / is usually *small*, not large. Hi all, Thanks for all the responses from everyone. I just wanted to confirm that there was nothing wrong with having soft updates installed. As it turns out "portsclean" is your friend! I used that and it freeded up all the missing space :) Thanks a million! Alistair. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Re: SoftUpdates on /
# [EMAIL PROTECTED] / 2003-02-21 14:52:45 -0500: > the reason that they disabled by default on / is almost > certainly because the / is usually *small*, not large. thus spoke Terry Lambert in Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: : I believe the reason it's not "on" in sysinstall is that sysinstall : tries to mount things async on the initial install, so that doing : things like unpacking ports doesn't take forever. If it fails, you : can just restart, and having to do that a couple of times is still : faster than waiting for ordered metadata. : The technical reason that it doesn't do it is that the mount update : is not logically an "unmount without destroying vnodes(inodes) in : core, with a remount with the new options". The main reason for : that is that the dependencies go all the way to the buffer cache, : and the backing vnode (e.g. the "raw" device) that's mounted does : not necessarily get its buffers flushed. Basically, you'd have to : put a little more work into the "mount update" code. : This was discussed a long time ago on -arch, when soft updates : first came into FreeBSD, and then again every 18 months or so, : ever after. See Kirk's postings on the subject, if you don't : want to take mine for it. -- If you cc me or remove the list(s) completely I'll most likely ignore your message.see http://www.eyrie.org./~eagle/faqs/questions.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Re: SoftUpdates on /
"John Straiton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > On Friday 21 February 2003 08:10 am, Alistair Phillips wrote: > > | Hi guys, > > > > | > > | So I enabled SoftUpdates when I was busy with FDISK at the install > > | time and now it seems like it may have been a bad idea. Now I know > > | 4GB is not much but it seems that there is no more space > > left. And at > > | times df -h will tell me there is -180MB available on / ! > > [ Dont get > > | me wrong here, I am not saying that SoftUpdates is causing > > me lack of > > | space. ] > > > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#SAFE-SOFTUPDATES > > Right from the horse's mouth so to speak as to the odd disk space > results of using soft-updates. A little out-of-date, even; the filesystem code has recently been adjusted to do garbage collection before reporting an out-of-space problem. [Not that this has much effect on the concerns in question.] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
RE: SoftUpdates on /
> On Friday 21 February 2003 08:10 am, Alistair Phillips wrote: > | Hi guys, > > | > | So I enabled SoftUpdates when I was busy with FDISK at the install > | time and now it seems like it may have been a bad idea. Now I know > | 4GB is not much but it seems that there is no more space > left. And at > | times df -h will tell me there is -180MB available on / ! > [ Dont get > | me wrong here, I am not saying that SoftUpdates is causing > me lack of > | space. ] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#SAFE-SOF TUPDATES Right from the horse's mouth so to speak as to the odd disk space results of using soft-updates. John To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Re: SoftUpdates on /
On Friday 21 February 2003 08:10 am, Alistair Phillips wrote: | Hi guys, | | So I enabled SoftUpdates when I was busy with FDISK at the install | time and now it seems like it may have been a bad idea. Now I know | 4GB is not much but it seems that there is no more space left. And | at times df -h will tell me there is -180MB available on / ! [ Dont | get me wrong here, I am | not saying that SoftUpdates is causing me lack of space. ] Softupdates don't take up any more or less space than not having them; just have "too much stuff" installed. Softupdates can cause *transient" failures to find space, but if you still have too little space after five minutes, then softupdates has nothing to do with it. And softupdates work much *better* on large partitions than small ones; with a 4G partition the transient space loss problem is virtually non-existant; the reason that they disabled by default on / is almost certainly because the / is usually *small*, not large. -- Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Re: SoftUpdates on /
Alistair Phillips wrote: Hi guys, I know that in the mailing list a while ago people were wondering why SoftUpdates were not enabled by default at install time on the / partition. Now I installed FreeBSD 4.7 RELEASE into a 4GB slice. I did not create seperate bits for / or /usr and such - but one large big space. So I enabled SoftUpdates when I was busy with FDISK at the install time and now it seems like it may have been a bad idea. Now I know 4GB is not much but it seems that there is no more space left. And at times df -h will tell me there is -180MB available on / ! [ Dont get me wrong here, I am not saying that SoftUpdates is causing me lack of space. ] Now I know that I should just du to see whats taking up the space and I will investigate that this weekend - but I was wondering if it was a bad idea to have gone and enabled SoftUpdates on / seeing as it is one big "slice"/"partitoin"? This machine is just a setup that I've got to play with - I'm sharing it with WinXP but would like to move across to FreeBSD full time. So I have no problems with having to re-install it! You don't have to reinstall to disable softupdates. If you read the man page for tunefs, it says that the changes will be made, but won't take effect until the system is rebooted. So you should be able to use tunefs to turn of softupdates and just reboot the machine to have it take effect. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Re: softupdates on /?
On Sat, Oct 19, 2002 at 11:40:34AM +0200, Gabriel Ambuehl wrote: > during the process of setting up some new servers I noticed that > sysinstall will enable softupdates by default for everything BUT /. > Is there any risk if I set / to use softupdates as well? The problem with softupdates is that a modification to the contents of a file system would result in a transient use of sufficient space to contain both the old and new versions of all affected files. Normally this is not a problem, but in certain cases it can lead to file modifications failing because of a full filesystem even though there is ultimately sufficient space available. One common instance of this is doing a 'make installworld' or 'make installkernel' where typical small root partitions generated by sysinstall can be overflowed. Now, arguments about how large a root partition should be or whether it should be amalgamated into /usr are neither here not there, but the contents of a standard root partition are generally static between major upgrades so there's no advantage to be gained by turning softupdates on. (Nb. This assumes that /var and /tmp are (sensibly) on different partitions to the root). > It works, but I'm not sure about the possible implications of this... For general use, softupdates on the root partition is not a problem. If your root partition is big enough to let you do whatever you need to by way of updating your system despite enabling softupdates, then you can turn it on with impunity. Of course, the size of the contents of the root partition tends to grow over time, so you may have to revisit that decision later on. It's also the case that modifications have been made to softupdates that ameliorate this effect, certainly in 5-CURRENT, not sure if they've been MFC'd to -STABLE though. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks Savill Way Marlow Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
