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Date:      Tue, 13 Mar 2001 01:33:01 -0800
From:      Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
To:        Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
Cc:        Helge Oldach <Helge.Oldach@de.origin-it.com>, oberman@es.net, sos@freebsd.dk, mobile@FreeBSD.ORG, stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Disk I/O problem in 4.3-BETA
Message-ID:  <20010313013301.L29888@fw.wintelcom.net>
In-Reply-To: <15021.58386.377695.943846@guru.mired.org>; from mwm@mired.org on Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 03:10:42AM -0600
References:  <20010312140636.A18351@fw.wintelcom.net> <200103130848.JAA08707@galaxy.de.cp.philips.com> <15021.58386.377695.943846@guru.mired.org>

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* Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> [010313 01:10] wrote:
> Helge Oldach <Helge.Oldach@de.origin-it.com> types:
> > Generally I'd say it's not a bad idea to have write caching on the disk
> > enabled - assuming that it is decently implemented. BTW, don't SCSI
> > disks use write cacheing as well? :-)
> 
> Yes, they do. And it's recommended that you turn it off if you turn on
> softupdates. The driver doesn't do it for you, though.

Oh great...  Perhaps the disk guru's can add some notes to the 
sfotupdates docco about this?  Or did I just miss this?

> I'd be interested to know details about why softupdates makes it more
> critical to have write caching off.

It's always critical to have write caching turned off to ensure filesystem
consistancy during an outtage.

Having write caching on is like having the disk ignore _any_
filesystem's attempt to do softupdates/logging/delayed-order-writes
because the disk _lies_ to the OS about when a write is safely on
the disk.

-- 
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org]
Daemon News Magazine in your snail-mail! http://magazine.daemonnews.org/


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