>>>>> "Andrew" == Andrew Gillham <gillhaa@ghost.whirlpool.com> writes:

Andrew> My understanding of the soft dependencies changes
Andrew> are that it is totally transparent and undetectable by an application.
Andrew> (e.g. the application has no way of knowing the metadata was not written
Andrew> synchronously to disk)

That's not strictly true.  The softdep code can reorder some directory
operations for convenience of stability.  When I asked Kirk about this
last year at USENIX, he said that was true but he didn't know of any
applications which did things that required the kernel honor the
ordering of operations as presented by user programs.

-- 
==John Kohl <jtk@kolvir.arlington.ma.us>, <john_kohl@alum.mit.edu>
Home page: <http://people.ne.mediaone.net/jtk/>
Bicycling and Skiing to keep fit.