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Date:      Sat, 16 Jan 1999 02:46:30 -0800 (PST)
From:      asami@FreeBSD.ORG (Satoshi Asami)
To:        phk@critter.freebsd.dk
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: mounting double-ended SCSI disks
Message-ID:  <199901161046.CAA47630@silvia.hip.berkeley.edu>
In-Reply-To: <9602.916482530@critter.freebsd.dk> (message from Poul-Henning Kamp on Sat, 16 Jan 1999 11:28:50 %2B0100)

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 * >However, if I try to mount it from B read-only while A is mounting it
 * >read-write, it succeeds.  This looks dangerous, as A writing data onto
 * >the disk could cause B's cache to go stale without B knowing it.  Is
 * >it a good idea to allow read-only mounts of a dirty filesystem anyway?
 * >(The filesystem could be corrupted, right?)
 * 
 * UFS/FFS doesn't expect anybody else to muck about on the device
 * while they have it open, and violating that is a bad idea, I cannot

I know that, but that's not the point here.  If the filesystem is
marked dirty, it could very well be corrupted.  Why am I allowed to
mount it (even read-only)?

I use softupdates on these filesystems, and my understanding is that
it is theoretically safe to mount a filesystem without fsck after a
crash if it's using softupdates.  But I don't see mount checking that
(if it is, it should allow read-write mounts too -- mount -f is not
quite the same thing is it will override the check even for
non-softupdates case).

 * tell if it would lead to panics, but I can imagine a couple of ways
 * it would become quantum mechanical in such a setup.

 * A couple of filesystem have been designed over the years which allow
 * for multiple machine access, but they tend to have lousy performance
 * because of caching being so inefficient.  One of the better 
 * implementations cheated, they stored the stuff in an Oracle database
 * on a third machine, but used a filesystem interface...

To clarify, we're not trying to build a distributed filesystem here.
We're planning to use the disks from both machines read-only most of
the time, and unmount it from one machine if the other needs to write
to it.

I was just wondering what kind of safety belts the OS already has, so
we can decide what else we need to implement.

Satoshi

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