Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 17:13:00 -0500 From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: softupdates... the sequel Message-ID: <82ui21$2s8a$1@twwells.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.9912110346420.56533-100000@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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In article <Pine.BSF.4.21.9912110346420.56533-100000@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>, Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> wrote: : (i guess that matters now ;-) does it make any sense to install : softupdates? Or is it negligible? Or am i sacrificing reliability? : : Just so i don't look foolish, here is m guess: : Yes, i will gain some performance : No, i will not lose reliability : : Correct me if i'm wrong. ;-) Softupdates may destroy your file system if you have any I/O errors. Seriously. I do have evidence to back this up -- I just recently had a rash of hard disk failures, in which small portions of the disk started reporting media failures. Where softupdates was enabled parts of the disk that were not involved with the hardware failure were also corrupted. In several cases, I ended up with partitions I could not clean with fsck. All I could do was mount them read-only and copy them elsewhere. *One* I couldn't even do that -- the root node was gone. Fortunately, that was just a /var partition. I'm not sure what the fix here is. Softupdates *should not* have this effect. My guess is that what is happening is that softupdates doesn't handle I/O errors well. The quick hack would be for softupdates to disable itself as soon as a partition reports an I/O error.... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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