From owner-freebsd-current Sun Sep 27 17:24:49 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id RAA17786 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Sun, 27 Sep 1998 17:24:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from kstreet.interlog.com (kstreet.interlog.com [198.53.146.171]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA17739 for ; Sun, 27 Sep 1998 17:24:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kws@kstreet.interlog.com) Received: (from kws@localhost) by kstreet.interlog.com (8.9.1/8.8.8) id UAA26874; Sun, 27 Sep 1998 20:22:47 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from kws) To: Peter Wemm Cc: Terry Lambert , bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans), Don.Lewis@tsc.tdk.com, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, roberto@keltia.freenix.fr Subject: Re: Softupdates panics References: <199809272146.FAA14600@spinner.netplex.com.au> From: Kevin Street Date: 27 Sep 1998 20:22:47 -0400 In-Reply-To: Peter Wemm's message of "Mon, 28 Sep 1998 05:46:36 +0800" Message-ID: <8790j584rs.fsf@kstreet.interlog.com> Lines: 34 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.5/XEmacs 20.4 - "Emerald" Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Peter Wemm writes: > Terry Lambert wrote: > > > >} > added `noatime' to two of my heavily used softupdates slices in > > > >} > > > >} noatime with SU is a known Bad Thing[tm]. > > > > > > > >I hadn't heard this. I don't know why that would be true. > > > > > > It is superstition. Perhaps stamping atimes hides some bugs in > > > softupdates by causing more frequent updates or changing the timing > > > of the updates. > > > > Doing "noatime" results in the loss of an inode write order > > dependency. > > So? what's being written while you're reading a file? > > If you're reading and writing the file together, then the modtime stamps > will cause the inode to be written out. If you're just reading, there is > no metadata dependency at all because nothing is changed at all. > > Had anybody got problems with softupdates that can be specifically > attributed to the use of -noatime ? The dumps I posted earlier in this thread were clearly triggered by noatime. With noatime in /etc/fstab I got 2 dumps in a few minutes doing big port compiles. Without noatime, I'm back to stability. This doesn't prove that noatime *causes* the problem, but it certainly triggers it in my case. -- Kevin Street street@iName.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message