Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:56:33 +0200 From: Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: UNEXPECTED SOFT UPDATE INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY Message-ID: <20080927165633.GA77239@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > I believe we're in overall agreement with regards to background_fsck > (should be disabled by default). In fact background fsck has been introduced for a good reason: waiting for a full fsck on modern big disks is far too long. Similarly write cache is enabled on ata disks for the reason that without it performance sucks too much. My humble opinion is that you attach far far too much importance to reliability in this game. There are many reasons why corruption may happen in the files, most of them being hardware related (bad ram, overheating chipset, etc.) Hence you can never be assured that your data is perfectly reliable (except perhaps ZFS permanent checksumming), all you have is some probability of reliability. I think that for most people what is important is a good balance between the risk of catastrophic failure (which is always here, and is increased little by background fsck) and the performance and ease of use. The FreeBSD developers have chosen this middle ground, with good reason, in my opinion. People who are more concerned with the reliability of their data, and want to pay the price can always disable background fsck, maintain backups, etc. Personnally i would run away from a system requiring hours of fsck before being able to run multiuser. Neither Windows, with NTFS, nor Linux, with ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, etc. require any form of scandisk or fsck. Demanding that full fsck is the default in FreeBSD is akin to alienating a large fraction of users who have greener pasture easily available. Idem for asking to disable write caching on the disks. So for most people there is a probability to get some day the UNEXPECTED SOFT UPDATE INCONSISTENCY message. They will run a full fsck in that occasion, not a terrible thing. In many years of FreeBSD use, it happened me a small number of times, and i have still to loose a file, at least that i remarked. -- Michel TALON
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