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On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 11:30:11PM +0000, Charles M. Hannum wrote:
> On Thursday 16 December 2004 23:23, Daniel Carosone wrote:
> > Finally, it's about getting the most out of cheap hardware - not just
> > the most performance but the most reliability as well.
>=20
> I have to conclude from this that you actually don't understand the real=
=20
> problems at all.

Rather, I'm trying to address just one component of it.

> * You can lose critical file system data (say, the root inode) just by tu=
rning=20
> off the power in the middle of a write.  Fixing this properly really=20
> *requires* journaling.  As Jason mentioned, your journaling system can ta=
ke=20
> care of the write ordering during flushing (and without much performance=
=20
> loss).

It doesn't specifically require journalling, though that's certainly
one way to address it.  Other ways include never overwriting data
in-place, such as it seems Solaris' new zfs claims to do, or in a
manner similar to postgresql's MVCC.  I've also seen journalled block
devices, either for the fss(4)-style case, or as a quicker hack than
rewriting the filesystem, though I'm not proposing one of those as a
good solution.

There's no question from me that NetBSD could also use better
filesystems, for all sorts of reasons.

> * There are other reliability problems, some of which were mentioned in r=
ecent=20
> (albeit terse) PRs, that are *much* bigger than the risk from the drive's=
=20
> write cache.

Certainly.

> You're shooting at the wrong target.

That depends on your definition of 'wrong'.  I'm shooting at the one I
can hit from where I'm standing, and hoping my comrades on the next
hill are shooting at stuff I can't.  Fire away.

--
Dan.

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