Wojciech Puchar writes:
you may postpone fsck when using softupdates. It is clearly stated in
softupdate documents you may find (McKusick was one of the authors).
that's what i do.
Then, you suffer a performance hit when fsck'ing in bg.
once again - read more carefully :)
I am NOT talking about background fsck which is implemented in FreeBSD and
i turn this off.
I am talking about just not doing fsck of every filesystem after crash.
And doing it within same day but when pause is not a problem.
This is legitimate method with UFS+softupdates.
OK, understood now, i think: you agree with temporarily loosing a bit of
unreclaimed free-space on disk until time permits cleaning things up
properly, afaiu softupdates (+journalling ? not really clear).
as someone proposed doing tests with writing random disk blocks, i would
rather write make a program that would flip random memory bit every few
minutes.
If you're assuming that even the computer itself ain't reliable, how the hell
Assuming hardware never fails is certainly wrong
And there's no practical point assuming it *always* fails, is there ?
could any FS be trustworthy then ??? IMHO, that's nonsense.
No it isn't. Sorry if i wasn't clear enough to explain it.
Well, if the thing that you try to defend against is plain hardware failure
(memory bits flipping, CPU going mad, whatever), i just doubt that any kind
of software layer could definitely solve it (checksums of checksums of… i/o
buffers, to be safe ? seriously ? do you trust your DMA chip, also ?): here,
one answer is ECC-RAM. Any practical FS will have to use RAM as a cache, no
matter what. If your cache can't be trusted, you're screwed. That's it. You
could build whatever clever mecanism into your on-disk layout to
(only) improve robustness, but you will have to trust your executing
environment.
Well, that's just my view of the matter. I'm a happy hammer user since
years, and i felt you made up strong arguments against it without much
experience with it.
Please try it, break it and if you can report anything that can help enhance
it, be welcome to post a bug report.
--
Francis
