From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Jul 18 8:49:52 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D79E837B400; Thu, 18 Jul 2002 08:49:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from smtp2.southeast.rr.com (smtp2.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.83]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A5EE743E3B; Thu, 18 Jul 2002 08:49:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bts@fake.com) Received: from mail7.nc.rr.com (fe7 [24.93.67.54]) by smtp2.southeast.rr.com (8.12.5/8.12.2) with ESMTP id g6IF0mAY015690; Thu, 18 Jul 2002 11:00:49 -0400 (EDT) Received: from this.is.fake.com ([66.26.254.93]) by mail7.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.757.75); Thu, 18 Jul 2002 09:50:39 -0400 Received: by this.is.fake.com (Postfix, from userid 111) id 70DCBBB2C; Thu, 18 Jul 2002 09:50:28 -0400 (EDT) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: "Brian T.Schellenberger" To: stable@freebsd.org, Julian Elischer Subject: softupdates: any way to force sync? Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 09:50:27 -0400 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: <20020718135028.70DCBBB2C@this.is.fake.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message