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Date:      Tue, 06 Feb 2001 20:35:51 +0100
From:      Andre Oppermann <oppermann@monzoon.net>
To:        Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>
Cc:        Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, Charles Randall <crandall@matchlogic.com>, Dan Phoenix <dphoenix@bravenet.com>, Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, Jos Backus <josb@cncdsl.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: soft updates and qmail (RE: qmail IO problems)
Message-ID:  <3A805217.1D045A00@monzoon.net>
References:  <Pine.LNX.4.21.0102061601420.1535-100000@duckman.distro.conectiva>

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Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Matt Dillon wrote:
> 
> >     QMail's FAQ is totally incorrect.  No major filesystem -- be it
> >     FFS, EX2FS, Reiser, FFS+Softupdates, guarentees that when you
> >     write() and close() a file that the file will then survive a disk
> >     crash.  All these filesystems guarentee is that if a crash occurs,
> >     when the system reboots the filesystems will be recovered into a
> >     consistent state.  Softupdates is considerably better at guarenteeing
> >     this consistency (as is something like Reiser), but if you crash a
> >     softupdates disk may wind up unwinding 'more' of the last few moments
> >     worth of operations then a normal filesystem would.  And, I might add,
> >     Reiser is the same way.
> 
> Reiserfs and ext3 have write-ahead logs and, AFAIK, fsync()
> will not return until there is a commit point in the log.

Also FFS/UFS will not return before the file and directory entry
is written to the disk.

> This means that fsync() will guarantee that the transactions
> won't be unwound (unless I've overlooked some weird special
> case situations where it is needed after all...).
> 
> The only filesystems I can see being completely resilient
> against these destructive roll-backs would be LFS and tux2.

This doesnt matter. If your machine crashes while receiving a message
you're never going to issue a SMTP 250 to the sending mail server and
it will try again later. We don't care if this incomplete queue file
survives or gets purged.

-- 
Andre


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