Subject: Softdep with ffs, how broken is it?
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Petri Koistinen <pkoistin@cs.stadia.fi>
List: tech-kern
Date: 06/27/2001 12:49:45
Hi!
I am one of those unlucky people that tried to use soft-depencies with ffs
in order to make it work faster and ended up crashing their machine under
heavy load.
There seems to be quite many PRs about soft-depencies crashing under heavy
load, like when doing 'cvs update' or 'make build'. And I am going to do
another PR after I have done some more testing with it so that I give some
hopefully useful information which would actually help debuging it.
But have somebody realy analyzed this problem? How do soft-depencies work?
Is there some whitepaper about it, I would like to read one. Is there some
constructional problems with idea of soft-depencies?
BTW, is mount(8) manpage realy giving the correct picture of softdep
option as it states: "This option has gone through moderate to heavy
testing, but should still be used with care." I think more accurate note
would be: "Beware: enabling this option will crash your system under heavy
disk usage." ;-)
Thanks for reading.
Regards
Petri Koistinen