On Tue, 29 Mar 2005, Karsten Kruse wrote:

> Michael Graff wrote:
>
> > Try unplugging it while it's mid-build.  If that works, try it 10 times more
> > at various points.  If you FS lives, cool.  Mine does not, on i386.
>
> I guess that your writeback cache is active. In that case softdep can not
> safe you from powerfailure because the disk writes when it's in the mood,
> not when it got the command to write.
>
> But even in this case a fs with softdep is safer than one without- It
> safes you when you accidently press reset or a kernel-panic occurs (the
> dirty stuff in the writeback cache can be written to disk as long as you
> have power).

Huh? How do you figure that one? If you don't have softdep, the data will
already have been written to disk. You might get into the panic in a state
where it isn't possible to flush the cache you know.
But without it, you always know that the data already is on the disk,
except for the just absolutely recent stuff, and the state of the data on
disk is much more predictable and fixable anyhow.

> Performance is a bonus, i think the safety alone is worth it.

Performance is the point, I believe. It is not as safe. If I'm wrong, I'm
sure someone will correct me.

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol