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McKusick's softupdate code integrated in to NetBSD

Posted by Nik on from the sync-sync-sync-reboot dept.

From the NetBSD -annouce mailing list: "Frank van der Linden (frank@wins.uva.nl) has brought Kirk McKusick's trickle sync + FFS soft update code into the main tree." For the uninitiated, softupdates is an extension to FFS which collects and orders writes to the filesystem, removing unnecessary metadata writes, and carrying out necessary metadata writes asynchronously. All the speed of Linux's default filesystem configuration, with all the safety of UFS. More information at the NetBSD news page, and Kirk McKusick's softupdates page. Softupdates has been in FreeBSD for a while, it's great to see NetBSD getting it as well.

2 of 9 comments (clear)

  1. Safety? by ajs · · Score: 2

    The "all the speed ... of [ext2fs] ... all the safety of UFS" comment makes me wonder. Why is ext2fs considered unsafe? I've only lost an ext2fs once, and that was a hardware problem (hard power-off caused a nice long disk-scribble). The recovery was fun to watch though ;-) This is one time I was thanking the heavens for the -y option to fsck!

    Seriously, though, what's the deal? Is this just "my OS' filesystem is more stable than your OS' filesystem," or is there a serious concern that I should be on the lookout for?

    1. Re:Safety? by ajs · · Score: 2

      All of this seems quite grim. So, why have I never lost anything. I've certainly had power-related crashes, but only once have I lost anything, and since I cannot see how the MASSIVE damage, in that case, was due to anything but a disk-scribble, I'm a little shocked by the gloom-and-doom comments.

      It kind of sounds like a theory-vs-practice thing, especially since both OSes can be configured to do things the way the other does by default.

      The "Linux is nice as a desktop, but not as a reliable server" comments are particularly shocking, given how many Linux-based servers are out there (I've got a few, and have managed more in the past). You would think that, for example, lost mail would be noticed if it were happening to all those sites that run Linux/Sendmail out there.

      Anyone have any theories as to why the gap exists?