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Date:      Thu, 31 Jan 2002 21:24:41 -0500
From:      Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org>
To:        Varshavchick Alexander <alex@metrocom.ru>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Again Softupdates on 4.5
Message-ID:  <20020201022442.272B74078@i8k.babbleon.org>
In-Reply-To: <20020130191606.640EC4078@i8k.babbleon.org>
References:  <Pine.GSO.4.21.0201302008560.13294-100000@apache.metrocom.ru> <20020130191606.640EC4078@i8k.babbleon.org>

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On Wednesday 30 January 2002 02:16 pm, Brian T.Schellenberger wrote:

> > > > So to make softupdates work, the partition should be reformatted
> > > > under 4.5, which means that after an upgrade from an earlier FreeBSD
> > > > version (without disk reformatting) the soft updates will not work,
> > > > is it true?
>
> You might be thinking of the new optimized disk layout code.  *That*
> requires reformatting the file system, but softupdates do not.

I'm amazed that nobody's taken me to task on this, but the above is not 
really quite true, either.

In order to have a fully optimized file system, you must wipe it & restart, 
but you get the benefit for all *new* files in the system immediately.

What this means in practice is that if the file system is relatively empty 
and unfragmented you get close to the full benefit as soon as you upgrade to 
4.5 without the need to do anything special, and if the file system if 
relatively full and fragmented you get virtually none of the benefit, so 
you'd have to wipe/reinstall to see the benefit.

But if it's a feature you are very keen on (as I was), the best advice is to 
wipe & reformat.


-- 
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . .   bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . .   bts@babbleon.org (personal)
                                ME -->  http://www.babbleon.org
http://www.eff.org   <-- GOOD GUYS -->  http://www.programming-freedom.org 

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