Bill Sommerfeld, after stripping all author information, writes:
>> Ideally you wouldn't want to update at all.  Since all the memory is
>> battery backed you could consider this "stable storage."

>No, not exactly, as it gets clobbered across reboots/system
>crashes/battery failures.

That's a problem with all battery backup schemes, except that you can
get around the "gets clobbered across reboots" part on suitable machines.

>There are three sorts of changes to disk pages:
>	1) "important" metadata changes (creating/deleting files/directories)
>	2) user data pages
>	3) atime updates

>I'm absolutely not willing to compromise the integrity of #1 or #2,

That's only a problem if your system is unstable.

On the other hand, if you flush dirty buffers each time the disk is
spinning but otherwise idle, you'll probably flush the data earlier
than with the current scheme.
-- 
Christoph Badura	bad@flatlin.ka.sub.org

You don't need to quote my .signature.  Everyone has seen it by now.
Besides, it doesn't add anything to the current thread.