From owner-freebsd-current Wed Oct 6 23:58:23 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from shell.futuresouth.com (shell.futuresouth.com [198.78.58.28]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 81EE614FC4 for ; Wed, 6 Oct 1999 23:58:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from fullermd@futuresouth.com) Received: (from fullermd@localhost) by shell.futuresouth.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id BAA01933; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 01:57:53 -0500 (CDT) Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 01:57:53 -0500 From: "Matthew D. Fuller" To: Peter Jeremy Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: {a}sync updates (was Re: make install trick) Message-ID: <19991007015753.C940@futuresouth.com> References: <99Oct6.103524est.40351@border.alcanet.com.au> <99Oct6.145359est.40347@border.alcanet.com.au> <19991006154419.O20768@futuresouth.com> <99Oct7.085536est.40332@border.alcanet.com.au> <19991006181542.S20768@futuresouth.com> <99Oct7.115403est.40324@border.alcanet.com.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre3i In-Reply-To: <99Oct7.115403est.40324@border.alcanet.com.au> X-OS: FreeBSD Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, Oct 07, 1999 at 11:57:26AM +1000, a little birdie told me that Peter Jeremy remarked > > How detailed should the man page be? Exactly my query in writing this ;> > If it stated "all file data will > be written synchronously, but inodes where the only update is atime > and free block bitmaps are written asynchronously", would that be any > clearer to a user who didn't have a detailed understanding of UFS? > If you would like it to say something different, write some patches > and send them in as a PR (keeping in mind phk's recent e-mail about > green bikesheds). I'm still stewing on what should be with it; what we have works fine, if being slightly inconsistent in an obscure way. I'm trolling for ideas on whether well enough should be left alone (since there's obviously an incredibly small percentage of people USING sync as a mountop), or whether a footnote should be added somewhere (I lean toward mount(2) instead of mount(8) myself, with a possible xref in mount(8)). I'll see what I think of, and possibly have some diffs tomorrow. > There should be fairly few writes to the root partition, so having > these writes synchronous is not a big performance hit. On the other > hand, there are probably a _lot_ of read accesses to devices in /dev > and files in /bin (how many of your scripts begin #!/bin/sh?). Unless > you specify NOATIME, each of these read accesses implies an atime > update within the inode. Making these synchronous probably would > be a big performance hit. This is why I haven't screamed for them to be sync-tified... -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | fullermd@over-yonder.net Unix Systems Administrator | fullermd@futuresouth.com Specializing in FreeBSD | http://www.over-yonder.net/ FutureSouth Communications | ISPHelp ISP Consulting "The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is because I haven't figured out how to light the middle yet" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message