Bill Stouder-Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 07:17:13PM +0100, Dieter wrote:
> > 1) background fsck
> 
> I don't think that background fsck is a good idea. While it'd be nice to 
> not have to wait on boot, I think the other options for a fast boot will 
> serve us better. Namely journaling.

 There are some applications that would be better served by the use of a
soft-update-enabled file system.  I'm in the process of building a
warm-standby backup server for a central file server.  The file server has
about 1.4 TB of RAID-5 protected storage in two file systems.

  Rather than backing up to many, many tapes, and suffering all of the
problems that entails, i'm planning on backing up to a preferably-NetBSD
FFS file system, and using snapshots to give access to older data.

IIRC, LFS does not support snapshots.  FFS does, with soft updates.
Because my understanding of snapshots and soft updates is that it's fairly
FFS-specific, i'm going to guess that adding snap shots (and soft updates)
to LFS would be a lot more work than porting the FreeBSD code that enables
background fsck, though this is just a guess.

 Because of limitations of the file server, i am working with two very
large file systems: one is ~425 GB, the other is about 1 TB.  So these
would be backed up to similarly large local (NetBSD) file systems that
would need to support snap shots, and therefore could not be LFS.

 So, as you say,  background fsck will get me going a lot faster.  But i
also need a FFS file system.

 -johan