From owner-freebsd-current Tue Oct 5 16:36:57 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from fw.wintelcom.net (ns1.wintelcom.net [209.1.153.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A8B8E156B5 for ; Tue, 5 Oct 1999 16:36:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bright@wintelcom.net) Received: from localhost (bright@localhost) by fw.wintelcom.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA27167; Tue, 5 Oct 1999 16:55:26 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 16:55:26 -0700 (PDT) From: Alfred Perlstein To: David Schwartz Cc: Warner Losh , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: make install trick In-Reply-To: <000101bf0f78$fbe58b40$021d85d1@youwant.to> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, David Schwartz wrote: > > > I have soft updates enabled on a fast machine at work. make > > installworld can fill up slash even though it has 15M free before the > > install. I think this is a bug in softupdates that it doesn't reclaim > > space quickly enough or in overflow situations. > > It's really not a bug, it's just a missing feature. There's no requirement > that a filesystem reclaim empty space immediately. You really shouldn't be > using fastupdates on nearly full filesystems -- it doesn't handle that > situation particularly well. > > Once could even argue that it's preferable to force the make to abort than > thrash the filesystem. Though a switch to allow it to thrash might be > helpful in degenerate cases such as this. > > Fastupdates is great for the most common case -- a typical /usr or /home > partition. That's where you care about write performance anyway. Actually this becomes quite dangerous when used on tmp filesystems, it used to be that mfs was a good idea for /tmp, but now softupdates drastically improves performance... however given that a full /tmp can kill a system that places us in a dilemma now doesn't it? *shrug* 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. Of course I'm trying desperately to understand the softupdates code right now. :) -Alfred To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message