From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Feb 6 9:42:30 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from brutus.conectiva.com.br (brutus.conectiva.com.br [200.250.58.146]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5B76337B65D for ; Tue, 6 Feb 2001 09:42:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (riel@localhost) by brutus.conectiva.com.br (8.11.2/8.11.2) with ESMTP id f16HeJp25581; Tue, 6 Feb 2001 15:40:19 -0200 X-Authentication-Warning: duckman.distro.conectiva: riel owned process doing -bs Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 15:40:19 -0200 (BRDT) From: Rik van Riel X-Sender: riel@duckman.distro.conectiva To: Poul-Henning Kamp Cc: Charles Randall , "'Matt Dillon'" , Dan Phoenix , Alfred Perlstein , Jos Backus , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: soft updates and qmail (RE: qmail IO problems) In-Reply-To: <35545.981478627@critter> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > In message <5FE9B713CCCDD311A03400508B8B3013054E3F5D@bdr-xcln.is.matchlogic.com>, Charles Randall writes: > >The qmail FAQ specifically recommends against soft updates for the mail > >queue. > > > >http://cr.yp.to/qmail/faq/reliability.html#filesystems > > > >Is this incorrect? > > It seems to indicate that qmail doesn't use fsync(2) as much as > it should do. If that is true, then yes, softupdates would mean > that a lot of things which qmail (mistakenly) think has been > written are in fact not on the disk. If this is true, I guess qmail can be officially considered broken. IIRC SMTP requires you to wait until the data is on stable (non-volatile) storage until you are allowed to return SMTP 250... The system call used to guarantee this is fsync (and friends?); if qmail doesn't use it but makes assumptions that aren't true on any decent OS out there ... regards, Rik -- Linux MM bugzilla: http://linux-mm.org/bugzilla.shtml Virtual memory is like a game you can't win; However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose... http://www.surriel.com/ http://www.conectiva.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message