On Sun, Jan 05, 2003 at 01:07:24PM -0600, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> On the question of whether or not softdeps should be still be
> considered experimental, I was engaged in a discussion in November in
> news:comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc under the subject "[NetBSD 1.6] current
> status of softdep". You might like to browse Google groups for that.
> To sum up, it's not experimental, most users do have it enabled, but
> it can't quite live up to it's guarantee of "never any file system
> corruption" unless you turn off the drive's write cache, which kills
> performance on ATA drives (yet the situation with write cache and
> softdeps isn't particularly worse than with write cache and no
> softdeps).

Does this mean the problems with the system crashing when too many
files are removed has been fixed? 

Want fun? On a machine with 64 megs of ram running 1.5 remove part
of a news archive (with, say, 10,000 files or so). The rm -rf runs
for a while and then BLAMMO it reboots. On the way back up fsck
fills up lost+found and then complains a lot. It took my 233 MHz
Alpha around an hour to finish an fsck. 

Has this been fixed? My personal opinion (FWIW) is that a softdep
that has this bug is an experimental softdep. 
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/
      'Concerns about "rights" and "ownership" of domains are inappropriate.  
 It is appropriate to be concerned about "responsibilities" and "service" 
 to the community.' -- RFC 1591, page 4: March 1994