Return to BSD News archive
#! rnews 3462 bsd Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!chi-news.cic.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!news.tacom.army.mil!reason.cdrom.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.development.system Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 00:23:16 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 51 Message-ID: <311DA774.167EB0E7@FreeBSD.org> References: <4er9hp$5ng@orb.direct.ca> <4f9skh$2og@dyson.iquest.net> <4fg8fe$j9i@pell.pell.chi.il.us> <311C5EB4.2F1CF0FB@freebsd.org> <4fjodg$o8k@venger.snds.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.1-STABLE i386) To: Michael Griffith <grif@hill.ucr.edu> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:14053 comp.os.linux.development.system:17654 Michael Griffith wrote: > Cool. It should be the new default. It is, since during the installation is not one of those times you're worried about data loss. If it croaks somewhere in the middle and hoses your new filesystem, you just start over. > I fail to see how it is subjective. That's because you're thinking in terms of mathematic proofs and not how well it actually WORKS IN PRACTICE. Most people are only interested in the latter and don't really care too much about the latest paper published by YourFavoriteU on hypothetical FS performance or reliability. Your proof is also bogus in that it doesn't take into account other important factors, such as whether the system is on an UPS or if kernel stability can be rated in crashes-per-year or crashes-per-week. Power loss and system crashes account for more data loss in the field than any other factors I can think of, and hence top my list of things to concern myself with. An interesting test, the results of which would actually be quite enlightening, would be to build two identical configurations and load one with FreeBSD 2.1 and the other with, say, with RedHat 2.1 or Slackware 3.0. Run a checksum scan across *every* file on each system and store the results someplace where they can't be nuked. Now start an application chosen for its disk-intensive nature, possibly with a few recursive chowns/chmods of large file trees (not an uncommon thing to find running on a typical UNIX system) sprinkled in. After a measured amount of wall clock time, literally yank the plug out of the wall on the test machine and bring it back up. Run your scan and see if any files were lost, checking also to see how the application's own data files were damaged, if at all (you obviously want to pick an application that writes easily verifyable data). Now do the same thing on the other box. How did it do? For extra points, try it with both sync/async mounts under FreeBSD, just to be fair. I'm not sure if ext2fs can be mounted synchronous for extra safety, but if so, you'd definitely want to test that too. Again, you can yell all you like about predicting the *theoretical* likelyhood of data loss and how you don't need to factor in external criteria like this to prove your point, but proving that point is *meaningless* to people who are actually using their machines to do real work! Enough with the empty proofs, bring on the empirical data, please! -- - Jordan Hubbard President, FreeBSD Project