Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 09:50:27 -0400 From: "Brian T.Schellenberger" <bts@babbleon.org> To: stable@freebsd.org, Julian Elischer <julian@freebsd.org> Subject: softupdates: any way to force sync? Message-ID: <20020718135028.70DCBBB2C@this.is.fake.com>
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I have been running into some issues with the time it takes softupdates to
fully finish updating. Recently I deleted a lot of files (about 3G worth of
files, actually), and it took over five minutes to really get the disk space
back. Since I wanted to start up a process to re-fill the disk space, this
was a pain: the other process kept dying because it ran out of disk space.
Others have posted about similar difficulties with backups. Of course
backing up a live filesystem can never be 100%, but it was in practical terms
closer before softupdates came along.
And yet, most of the time I *love* softupdates. It makes the system
tolerable to use while turning write caching off, which makes me feel a whole
lot safer. I've not had any (non-hardware-related) problems with disk
corruption since I started running softupdates and I had had corrupt
filesystems mulitiple times before.
So . . .
What I'd like is a command like "syncupdates" or something that would
synchronosly force all the pending softupdates updates to update and return
only when that was complete. Then when I had the (rare) occaisons where I
really wanted them synced up, they could be synched up but the rest of the
time I could still let it update when it pleased.
Questions:
- Is there any functionality already in the system that I don't know about?
- Are there any plans to add it?
- If not, I might have a go at it myself. Other than your code and the
original paper are there any references or information that I should have in
hand?
- And would you, Julian, be willing to review whatever I might come up with
and possibly commit it if it looks plausible? (I don't run current so
whatever patches I'd come up with would be against -stable, but I presume
that doing a sort of "reverse MFC" to translate them to -current patches
wouldn't be terribly difficult.)
Please understand that though I've programming for many, many years I've only
done the very most trivial of things in the kernel before so I'd bring more
enthusiasm than expertise to such an undertaking. I'd actually prefer if
this feature just sort of dropped into my lap, but I'm interested enough in
the feature to have a go at doing it myself.
Thanks for any insight you can offer.
--
Brian T. Schellenberger
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal)
http://www.babbleon.org
http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org
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