*BSD News Article 61431


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From: hpa@freya.yggdrasil.com (H. Peter Anvin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.development.system
Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux
Date: 5 Feb 1996 22:07:20 GMT
Organization: linux.* maintainer
Lines: 23
Message-ID: <hpa.31167ef4.I.use.Linux@freya.yggdrasil.com>
References: <4er9hp$5ng@orb.direct.ca> <4f27sc$13a@dyson.iquest.net> <4f4c78$dsb@aurora.romoidoy.com> <strenDMBHHo.311@netcom.com>
Reply-To: hpa@storm.net (H. Peter Anvin)
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:13790 comp.os.linux.development.system:17335

Followup to:  <strenDMBHHo.311@netcom.com>
By author:    stren@netcom.com (Sam Trenholme)
In newsgroup: comp.os.linux.development.system
> 
> However, if I read the article before this one in the thread correctly,
> there is a price for the speed of ext2-- you stand more chance of a crash
> making your file system unusuable.  The BSD FFS has an option that gives
> you this extra speed, at the expense of safety, and you can, for example,
> have a separate "news" partition that is fast/unsafe, and have your main
> partition be slow/safe.  The ext2 filesystem, however, is forced to be in
> the "fast/unsafe" mode. 
> 

Incorrect.  ext2 is switchable too, but the default is different,
mostly because it really turns out that BSD-style synchronous metadata
updates are slow and buy you very little in terms of data safety, and
can, in fact, be a security hole.

	-hpa
-- 
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