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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!classic.iinet.com.au!news.uoregon.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!news.cloud9.net!cloud9.net!tls From: tls@cloud9.net (Thor Lancelot Simon) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc Subject: Re: NetBSD Filesystems Date: 1 Aug 1995 09:25:01 GMT Organization: Cloud 9 Internet, White Plains, New York, USA Lines: 40 Message-ID: <3vkrtd$hn5@news.cloud9.net> References: <1995Jul26.123455.28242@lssec.bt.co.uk> <3ve9jk$11b8@info4.rus.uni-stuttgart.de> <MICHAELV.95Jul30182230@MindBender.HeadCandy.com> <3vjcve$mah@wolfe.wimsey.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: cloud9.net In article <3vjcve$mah@wolfe.wimsey.com>, Curt Sampson <curt@cynic.portal.ca> wrote: >In article <MICHAELV.95Jul30182230@MindBender.HeadCandy.com>, >Michael L. VanLoon <michaelv@MindBender.HeadCandy.com> wrote: > >>In article <3ve9jk$11b8@info4.rus.uni-stuttgart.de> ralf@informatik.uni-koblenz.de (Ralf Baechle) writes: >> >> I found ext2fs MUCH faster due to it's >> asynchronous updates of the fs meta information for that case. >> >>This has nothing to do with the filesystem. NetBSD (and I believe >>FreeBSD) supports a flag that will let you mount the filesystem >>asynchronously (wrt metadata writes). However, it is not the default, >>and most unix-seasoned people consider it just asking for trouble. > >It is asking for trouble. If you really need fast writes on lots >of small files (i.e., for a news filesystem or something like that) >the proper thing is to use the log filesystem or something similar. Keep in mind that with many log-structured filesystems, the result on a crash may be that you lose the last bunch of files written outright, along with their metadata. (Though since the files are lost, the lack of metadata for them is of course correct. :-) UFS is slightly more resistant to this, though obviously not completely. If you're running a news server that _must_ be consistent with its active and history files, you really, really want a big UPS, no matter what filesystem you're using. >Is LFS working in NetBSD? Not really. And unlike its Sprite cousin, it probably needs a version of fsck to really be stable across crashes/power events. That program doesn't exist. The only thing that seems to make it likely that LFS might get worked on enough to be useful is that I hear a rumor that the "ccd" striping device works on all the ports in -current. LFS is a big, big win on RAID. -- Thor Lancelot Simon tls@cloud9.net Somewhere they're meeting on a pinhead, calling you an angel.