From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 6 1:19:30 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 5BE3337B405 for ; Wed, 6 Mar 2002 01:19:27 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 70278 invoked by uid 100); 6 Mar 2002 09:19:26 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15493.57118.414479.492155@guru.mired.org> Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 03:19:26 -0600 To: Brian T.Schellenberger Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Softupdates on root in 4.5-RELEASE In-Reply-To: <47615415@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: "Mike Meyer" X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.48 (Python 2.2 on freebsd4) 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 Brian T.Schellenberger types: > On Tuesday 05 March 2002 10:24 am, Burhan Nazir wrote: > > Softupdates will not write any data immediatly to the disk. I believe > > it is about 30 seconds b4 any data actually gets wriiten. This enhances > > disk write speed for certain types of operations. However, there is a > > small risk of data loss/coruption if the machine looses power b4 any data > > was written. For that reason, ppl believe that it is not a good idea to > > have softupdates on the system critical root partition > I think it's more a matter of avoiding it on partitions that are likely to be > rather full and fairly small, since the delay in processing deletes means > that you effectively lose a certain amount of disk space due to processing > time. In particular, "make installkernel" on a system with a default root file system can easily fail because the kernel and modules still haven't been deleted when the you try to do the install. > I personally make the root partition larger and enable soft-updates but > disable write-caching. This seems much safer than the system default way of > doing things to me, but with nearly equal performance. I personally make the root partitoin larger, enable soft updates, and use SCSI disks with proper tagged queuing support so the write cache isn't a problem. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message