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Date:      Tue, 13 Oct 1998 00:22:12 -0700
From:      Don Lewis <Don.Lewis@tsc.tdk.com>
To:        "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@plutotech.com>, Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
Cc:        Don.Lewis@tsc.tdk.com, julian@whistle.com, freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: filesystem safety and SCSI disk write caching
Message-ID:  <199810130722.AAA14971@salsa.gv.tsc.tdk.com>
In-Reply-To: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@plutotech.com> "Re: filesystem safety and SCSI disk write caching" (Oct 13, 12:59am)

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On Oct 13, 12:59am, "Justin T. Gibbs" wrote:
} Subject: Re: filesystem safety and SCSI disk write caching

} I'm still unclear as to whether Don was turning off power or hitting what I
} consider the reset button.  His comment about UPSes use makes me think he
} was testing power outage scenarios.

I was hitting the reset button to test the softupdates code because I
thought that write caching on the drive was disabled.  It wasn't until
I got the unexpected filesystem inconsistency that I actually checked
the state of the write caching bit.  Once I disable write caching, I didn't
get any more unexpected inconsistencies, though I didn't repeat this
experiment enough to totally convince myself that my results were
conclusive.

With write caching disabled, I'd expect the same results with either
the reset button or the power switch, but I didn't test the latter
since it's a lot rougher on the hardware.

If the inconsistency was due to a missing softupdates dependency, I'd
expect to see more inconsistencies in the many panics I provoked in
some other testing I was doing.  With the exception of some
inconsistencies created by bugs in fsck that corrupted the filesystem
while attempting to fix it, I did not see any unexpected inconsistencies
caused by these panics.

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