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Date:      Tue, 14 Sep 1999 08:51:16 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Thomas Graichen <graichen@innominate.de>
To:        hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   SOFTUPDATES and fsck
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.9909140849530.3347-100000@cello.innominate.local>

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hello ...

maybe this belongs more to fs than to hackers - but maybe this is
the correct place here for it ...

i've just read the soft updates paper from:

  http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/CSE-TR-254-95/

at which the soft updates README's in the FreeBSD tree point and ran
across the following lines in the section 5.1 "file system recovery":

"With the conventional implementation, the fsck utility must be run on
a file system before it can be mounted after any system failure. By
guarateeing that the on-disk metadata can always be used safely (except
when media corruption destroys live metadata), our soft updates im-
plementation lifts this requirement. A file system can be safely
mounted and used immedeately after most system failures, but may
contain several inconsistencies:

* unused blocks may not appear in the free space maps

* inode link counts may exceed the numer of associated directory
  entries

* unreferenced inodes may not appear in the free inode maps

One can run the fsck utility on the filesystem, when convenient, to
reclaim unreferenced ressources and correct link counts. ..."

at another point it is mentioned that it should be doable to write
an fsck tool which can do those corrections in background while the
filesystem is mountet read/write ...

now my question: how much of this applies to the soft updates im-
plementation in FreeBSD ? - might this eventually open the door
to an fsck free bootup after a system crash without having to
write a journaled filesystem for FreeBSD ? - i think this is
one point which gets more and more important on systems with
several 100 gb disk space and thus enormous fsck times after
a failure

can anyone - who is deep in the details of the FreeBSD soft updates
implementation (julian, matt, kirk) give some comments on this ?

a lot of thanks in advance

t

-- 
graichen@innominate.de
                                                        innominate AG
                                                    networking people
fon: +49.30.308806-13 fax: -77 web: http://innominate.de pgp: /pgp/tg



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