*BSD News Article 65101


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From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.os.linux.x,comp.os.linux.hardware,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Why to not buy Matrox Millennium
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 1996 23:06:28 -0800
Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM
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To: Peter Berger <peterb@hoopoe.psc.edu>
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Peter Berger wrote:
> Linux uses asynchronous metadata updates, which the *BSD crowd has
> always insisted puts you at a greater risk of losing data in the
> event of a crash.  My understanding is that FreeBSD will be making
> this an option...whether async metadata updates are an improvement
> or not depends on your needs.  I certainly will like having the
> option, anyway.

This is already the case in 2.2 (and has been retrofitted into
2.1-stable, from which the next mainstream release will be derived).
You can tweak the bit on and off for a given filesystem and visually see
the difference as something like a large tar file extracts - it's quite
impressive.  Simply:

	mount -u -o async /some/existing/fs

To turn it on for a filesystem that's already mounted, or live a little
more dangerously and add it to the filesystem options in /etc/fstab.

The installation (sysinstall) is one area where the new async feature is
used - all filesystems are initially mounted async during extraction of
the release since if the power goes out during installation you can
simply install again.  The increase in installation speed is strikingly
noticable!
-- 
- Jordan Hubbard
  President, FreeBSD Project