From owner-freebsd-current Tue Oct 5 23:51:58 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from storm.FreeBSD.org.uk (storm.freebsd.org.uk [194.242.128.198]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 31D4C15713 for ; Tue, 5 Oct 1999 23:50:21 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from brian@Awfulhak.org) Received: from hak.lan.Awfulhak.org (root@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by storm.FreeBSD.org.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id HAA35637; Wed, 6 Oct 1999 07:49:50 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from brian@Awfulhak.org) Received: from hak.lan.Awfulhak.org (brian@localhost.lan.Awfulhak.org [127.0.0.1]) by hak.lan.Awfulhak.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id HAA24521; Wed, 6 Oct 1999 07:14:20 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from brian@hak.lan.Awfulhak.org) Message-Id: <199910060614.HAA24521@hak.lan.Awfulhak.org> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 2/24/98 To: peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au Cc: Alfred Perlstein , freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: make install trick In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 06 Oct 1999 10:38:49 +1000." <99Oct6.103524est.40351@border.alcanet.com.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 07:14:19 +0100 From: Brian Somers Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > On 1999-Oct-06 09:55:26 +1000, Alfred Perlstein wrote: > >I've seen softupdates nearly eliminate disk io for systems that used > >an abmornal amount of temp files, but the fact that it can destabilize > >a system worries me greatly. > > What do you mean by `destabilize'? There are bugs in softupdates > which mean that an application may receive ENOSPC when writing to a > filesystem even though space on that filesystem has been recently > freed. Any application that cannot handle this situation is _broken_. [.....] :-] You're joking right ? Most applications don't even *notice* the situation let alone handle it. Whaddaya do when /var/log runs out of space ? Show me an app that handles it..... I guess you can argue the case, but in real life, running out of any machine resource can cause all sorts of possibly unrecoverable problems. IMHO the best way to deal with it in a generic way is to have the give-me-the-resource function block if it really thinks it's a temporary thing. In the case of softupdtes, I'd be surprised if it couldn't easily figure out that the problem is *probably* transient and block, but of course to figure out exactly how transient it is would probably involve about the same amount of effort as just processing the softupdates ``todo'' list there and then. Anyway, I'll shut up now :-I -- Brian Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour ! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message