Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 01:29:56 +0100 From: Josef Karthauser <joe@pavilion.net> To: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com> Cc: Akinori -Aki- MUSHA <knu@idaemons.org>, andrews@technologist.com, mckusick@FreeBSD.org, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/contrib/softupdates softdep.h ffs_softdep.c Message-ID: <20000628012956.B19558@pavilion.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.10006270929120.25569-100000@semuta.feral.com>; from mjacob@feral.com on Tue, Jun 27, 2000 at 09:29:24AM -0700 References: <20000627172831.G32373@pavilion.net> <Pine.BSF.4.05.10006270929120.25569-100000@semuta.feral.com>
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On Tue, Jun 27, 2000 at 09:29:24AM -0700, Matthew Jacob wrote: > > > > I'm not sure.... I have a feeling that there are softupdate problems > > running under SMP. A number of times this year I've lost whole filesystems > > on an SMP machines. :( > > Really? Have you told Kirk? > No because I've not had a chance to test it - it's on a production webserver. It's running 3.4 currently, and I've had a couple of crashes over the last year. The first one produced a lot of 'SOFTUPDATE INCONSISTANCY' errors and lost a lot of files - we had to recover from tape and diff to see which files had been lost. (This was on a 16gb ccd containing customer web data). The second time was more recently. The machine crashed and in the process the / partition disappeared, so badly that the kernel wasn't available to boot from! We brought it up on another drive and did a fsck and all the files turned up in /lost+found. Not a single file was left in the file system. Fortunately we had a fresh level 0 dump from that evening and so I did a 'newfs' and 'restore' and the machine's been running since. More recently a friend of mine was having crashes doing a make world under 4.0 with SMP and softupdate. Switching softupdates off caused the crashes to go away. The thing that worries me is that softupdates is supposed to render the filesystem safe so that if a crash occurs we only loose recent data. In both my cases we lost data that hadn't been touched for years - i.e. ports tree data that hasn't ever been touched. It definitely wasn't in the buffer cache before the crash. ! Is anyone else here using softupdates in an SMP environment? I'm not saying that softupdates doesnt work in SMP, but I'm worried that if softupdates doesn't leave things in as consistant a state as you'd expect in an SMP environment. Joe To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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