From owner-freebsd-current  Thu Jul  9 13:59:09 1998
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Date: Thu, 09 Jul 1998 13:56:11 -0700
From: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>
Organization: Whistle Communications
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Subject: TESTERS NEEDED: Softupdates looks Very good.
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As of this morning there are 2 known bugs in Softupdates, 
and one known 'gotcha'

The bugs are:

1/
the following "rare" panic has not been traced yet as we have been
unable to get a core file with it..

       panic: newdirrem: inum 26368 should be 26367

2/
there is also a dependency order problem in some cases
(very rare)

Over all a crash with soft updates will already probably leave your
disk in a much cleaner state than you're used to.


The "gotcha" is really quite hillarious..
This note from Matt Dillon at Best Communications..

------ Begin quote------
unlink() is so fast under softupdates that Diablo's news spool
expiration removed 80% of the files in the test news spool before
it realized that it had sufficient free space.  Oops!
------

This is because the unlink happens asynchronourly, and the
space may not show up for 30 seconds or so.

Unlink() is now 2 orders of magnitude faster..

in 30 seconds you could delete several million files,
(and it apparently did). Unlinking the entire X11R6 hierarchy 
takes well under 1 second. It's now possible to type 
#rm -rf / 
and REALLY screw yourself before you have time to hit ^C :-)


We need more testers. specifically to try get a core dump of that panic.

If you know how to compile a debug kernel
	config -g MYKERNEL
	cd ../../compile/MYKERNEL
	make depend; make
	cp kernel kernel.debug
	strip -d kernel
	make install

and you know how to get a core dump
	dumpon /dev/rsd0b

and you know how to run softupdates
	cd /sys/ufs/ffs
	cat *READ*

then YOU are needed for testing!

if you get a core-dump and you have a matching debug kernel,
let us know asap.

julian

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