From owner-freebsd-mobile Tue Mar 13 20: 4:33 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Received: from grumpy.dyndns.org (user-24-214-76-236.knology.net [24.214.76.236]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E013737B718; Tue, 13 Mar 2001 20:04:27 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dkelly@grumpy.dyndns.org) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by grumpy.dyndns.org (8.11.2/8.11.2) with ESMTP id f2E44Ne16415; Tue, 13 Mar 2001 22:04:24 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from dkelly@grumpy.dyndns.org) Message-Id: <200103140404.f2E44Ne16415@grumpy.dyndns.org> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.3.1 01/18/2001 with nmh-1.0.4 To: Pete French Cc: mobile@FreeBSD.ORG, sos@freebsd.dk, stable@FreeBSD.ORG From: David Kelly Subject: Re: Disk I/O problem in 4.3-BETA In-reply-to: Message from Pete French of "Tue, 13 Mar 2001 11:51:11 GMT." Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 22:04:23 -0600 Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Pete French writes: > All very interesting, but a small point has been forgotten > hasnt it ? The way I read this thread is that until recentlly > write-caching was enabled by default and has now been disabled (hence > the original obseravtion of disc performance dropping). > > I havent noticed that FreeBSD has a bad reputation for loss of data > in the event of am power outage, and my own experience backs this up. > As so many people appear to have been running it this way by default until > now you might have though that if it were a serious problem in reality then > people would have noticed by now ? Well, I am an ex-Linux user who got fed up with Linux trashing my disk 3 times one week. Each time (kernel panics) the damage was bad enough fsck (e2fsck?) deleted a lot of critical files making a wipe/reinstall the fastest way back to a running system. This was shortly after the release of FreeBSD 2.0.0. Remember it well because that is when I became a FreeBSD user. Hmm, probably 6 years ago this month. Have watched Linux from "outside" since then. Noticed I was not the only one losing data. From what I've seen the Linux solution was not to to fix a faulty design but to hack it until it doesn't lose as much. Linux was/is very proud of their ext2fs speed. Clearly at the expense of reliability. Oddly enough that machine got 600k Bytes/sec thruput on Linux, but 900k Bytes/sec on FreeBSD 2.0.0-RELEASE. 240 MB Western Digital IDE drive. IMO the most reliable settings are the correct thing to do in spite of simpleminded magazine authors who will "do a shootout" of Linux vs. FreeBSD using only the stock settings. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message