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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.mathworks.com!enews.sgi.com!news.be.com!news1.crl.com!nexp.crl.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community" Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 16:18:39 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 30 Message-ID: <333C5FDF.15FB7483@FreeBSD.org> References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <5hfh2l$i13@flea.best.net> <5hfl3n$a3t@fido.asd.sgi.com> <5hh5n2$9q8@flea.best.net> <5hhi67$1gl@fido.asd.sgi.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 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2.1-RELEASE i386) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37952 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6489 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29489 Ray Chen wrote: > The commit records get batched and written out asynchronously. If you > crash before the record is written out, you lose the file creation but > your filesystem is still consistent. > > There's no way an FFS will ever be able to do that. Sure you can run > in async mode. But if you crash, even if the async writes are properly > ordered, unless all of them went out, you've probably got an inconsistent > filesystem. Now I think you may be unfairly slamming Kirk McKusick's work on soft updates - it makes FFS do exactly that, using a complex internal state machine (I wish Kirk read USENET, but I doubt he has the time). He's still chasing a few errant bugs, last I heard, but the concept seems to work and we (in the *BSD camps) are all just basically waiting around for him to release something we can BETA. I've no doubt that XFS also provides some substantial benefits of its own, but then it wouldn't exactly be the only proprietary high-speed filesystem solution available, either. Rather than going on bended knee, checkbook in hand, to SGI or Transarc for a very expensive or outright unavailable filesystem port, it's far more my preference to support Kirk's work and get something in the end which can be freely applied to a wide range of operating systems. Just judging from my last casual census, at least, FFS does appear to be quite successful in that role and I think we may be comparing apples and oranges here. -- - Jordan Hubbard FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM.