Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.eng.convex.com!newshost.convex.com!news.duke.edu!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.sprintlink.net!news.ns.net!news.gv.net!usenet
From: Dana Jacobsen <dana@acm.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.development.system
Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 08:11:01 -0800
Organization: Independent Consultant
Lines: 46
Message-ID: <31220995.C4C54C1@acm.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> <311DA774.167EB0E7@FreeBSD.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.162.164.63
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0b6a (X11; I; Linux 1.3.59 i486)
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:14257 comp.os.linux.development.system:17870
Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> 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.
I've been reviewing this discussion, and it's been terribly frustrating to
see:
1) the Linux people going on for weeks on end about how ext2fs can run
both sync and async, while FreeBSD can only run sync -- ignoring the
countless times we've heard that FreeBSD can do both also.
2) the FreeBSD people going on for weeks on end about how FFS can run
both sync and async, while Linux can only run async -- ignoring the
countless times we've heard that Linux can do both also.
They both support synchronous or asynchronous metadata. This support has
been available for something like a year now, during which time the other
camp seems to have done it's darnest to ignore it. They only differ in the
default setting! The next time you hear someone repeating this nonsense,
tell them that they're comparing their recent system with the other system's
obsolete information.
Ob real life experience: I'm running Linux on my home system, and have a
Pentium OverDrive chip. It acts up a lot (I've given up on it -- going to
buy a whole new computer), and for a while it would just lock up the machine
at random intervals. Note that this is a Bad Thing with write caches. So
after fsck complained a few times about various things being misaligned, I
decided to remount my drives sync. Just use "mount -o remount,sync /dev/xxx"
for my disks, and off I go. Did I notice a performance difference? Yes and
no. Doing recursive rm's on large directories was noticibly slower. Big
deal -- how often do I do that, and besides, it was maybe 2 times slower at
maximum. The disk was active more often (which is to be expected). But
overall I hardly noticed at all. It really didn't have much of a performance
impact for my work (which is not slewing through news files). And next, for
the big gain -- in the 3 lockups I ran into, fsck didn't complain even once.
This is about equivalent to the "unplug power" test, since the CPU just locks
up and everything stops. No choice but to hit reset.
As to whether I just got lucky, or if I suffered some "hidden" damage, I
can't say. I haven't found anything out of the ordinary (not counting those
weird ascii cows in my .netscape directory... :-), but this is just a
single experience.
--
Dana Jacobsen (dana@acm.org)
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~jacobsd/Dana.html