From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Feb 1 0:50:19 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail7.nc.rr.com (fe7.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.54]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C705037B41F for ; Fri, 1 Feb 2002 00:50:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from i8k.babbleon.org ([66.57.85.154]) by mail7.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.687.68); Thu, 31 Jan 2002 21:26:07 -0500 Received: by i8k.babbleon.org (Postfix, from userid 111) id 272B74078; Thu, 31 Jan 2002 21:24:42 -0500 (EST) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Brian T.Schellenberger To: Varshavchick Alexander , questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Again Softupdates on 4.5 Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 21:24:41 -0500 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3] References: <20020130191606.640EC4078@i8k.babbleon.org> In-Reply-To: <20020130191606.640EC4078@i8k.babbleon.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: <20020201022442.272B74078@i8k.babbleon.org> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wednesday 30 January 2002 02:16 pm, Brian T.Schellenberger wrote: > > > > So to make softupdates work, the partition should be reformatted > > > > under 4.5, which means that after an upgrade from an earlier FreeBSD > > > > version (without disk reformatting) the soft updates will not work, > > > > is it true? > > You might be thinking of the new optimized disk layout code. *That* > requires reformatting the file system, but softupdates do not. I'm amazed that nobody's taken me to task on this, but the above is not really quite true, either. In order to have a fully optimized file system, you must wipe it & restart, but you get the benefit for all *new* files in the system immediately. What this means in practice is that if the file system is relatively empty and unfragmented you get close to the full benefit as soon as you upgrade to 4.5 without the need to do anything special, and if the file system if relatively full and fragmented you get virtually none of the benefit, so you'd have to wipe/reinstall to see the benefit. But if it's a feature you are very keen on (as I was), the best advice is to wipe & reformat. -- Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work) Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal) ME --> http://www.babbleon.org http://www.eff.org <-- GOOD GUYS --> http://www.programming-freedom.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message