Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 07:14:19 +0100 From: Brian Somers <brian@Awfulhak.org> To: peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au Cc: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: make install trick Message-ID: <199910060614.HAA24521@hak.lan.Awfulhak.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 06 Oct 1999 10:38:49 %2B1000." <99Oct6.103524est.40351@border.alcanet.com.au>
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> On 1999-Oct-06 09:55:26 +1000, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> >I've seen softupdates nearly eliminate disk io for systems that used
> >an abmornal amount of temp files, but the fact that it can destabilize
> >a system worries me greatly.
>
> What do you mean by `destabilize'? There are bugs in softupdates
> which mean that an application may receive ENOSPC when writing to a
> filesystem even though space on that filesystem has been recently
> freed. Any application that cannot handle this situation is _broken_.
[.....]
:-] You're joking right ? Most applications don't even *notice*
the situation let alone handle it. Whaddaya do when /var/log runs
out of space ? Show me an app that handles it.....
I guess you can argue the case, but in real life, running out of any
machine resource can cause all sorts of possibly unrecoverable
problems. IMHO the best way to deal with it in a generic way is to
have the give-me-the-resource function block if it really thinks it's
a temporary thing.
In the case of softupdtes, I'd be surprised if it couldn't easily
figure out that the problem is *probably* transient and block, but
of course to figure out exactly how transient it is would probably
involve about the same amount of effort as just processing the
softupdates ``todo'' list there and then.
Anyway, I'll shut up now :-I
--
Brian <brian@Awfulhak.org> <brian@FreeBSD.org>
<http://www.Awfulhak.org>; <brian@OpenBSD.org>
Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour ! <brian@FreeBSD.org.uk>
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