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Date:      Fri, 7 Apr 2000 08:56:13 -0700 
From:      Stephen Byan <Stephen.Byan@quantum.com>
To:        "'Kenneth D. Merry'" <ken@kdm.org>, Stephen Byan <Stephen.Byan@qntm.com>
Cc:        freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   RE: newfs on IBM disks slower than Seagate disks?
Message-ID:  <8133266FE373D11190CD00805FA768BF02EE9F66@shrcmsg1.tdh.qntm.com>

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Too bad. It'd be a useful thing for the I/O subsystem to know, both from a
data integrity and from a performance viewpoint. In one of my former lives
(at Hitachi), we hacked OSF/1's flavor of UFS to pass a "this is metadata"
flag down  to the disk device driver in the buf header. I arranged for the
big honking mainframe disk controllers to put the unflagged writes in their
copious volatile cache, and the flagged writes in their more-limited
non-volatile cache.

Regards,
-Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth D. Merry [mailto:ken@kdm.org]
Sent: Friday, April 07, 2000 11:30 AM
To: Stephen Byan
Cc: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: newfs on IBM disks slower than Seagate disks?


On Fri, Apr 07, 2000 at 06:39:01 -0700, Stephen Byan wrote:
> Does the FreeBSD SCSI subsystem set the FUA bit in the CDB for UFS
metadata
> writes? If so, then data integrity with WCE=1 is probably no worse than
for
> WCE=0, since the filesystem is caching non-metadata writes anyway.
> 
> If UFS and CAM haven't made arrangements to hint which disk writes are
> precious, then I think you're best off setting WCE=0, unless your system
and
> your disks are on a UPS.

CAM doesn't set the FUA bit on metadata writes because it doesn't currently
have a way to distinguish between metadata and normal data.

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken@kdm.org


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