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Date:      Mon, 24 Feb 2003 13:36:03 -0800
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        Darryl Okahata <darrylo@soco.agilent.com>
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Vinum R5 [was: Re: background fsck deadlocks with ufs2 and big disk]
Message-ID:  <3E5A9043.CCFE4A84@mindspring.com>
References:  <200302241818.KAA22896@mina.soco.agilent.com>

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Darryl Okahata wrote:
> Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> wrote:
> > I think this is an expected problem with a lot of concatenation,
> > whether through Vinum, GEOM, RAIDFrame, or whatever.
> >
> > This comes about for the same reason that you can't "mount -u"
> > to turn Soft Updates from "off" to "on": Soft Updates does not
> > tolerate dirty buffers for which a dependency does not exist, and
> > will crap out when a pending dirty buffer causes a write.
> 
>      Does this affect background fsck, too (on regular, non-vinum
> filesystems)?  From what little I know of bg fsck, I'm guessing not, but
> I'd like to be sure.  Thanks.

No, it doesn't.  Background fsck works by assuming that the only
thing that could contain bad data is the cylinder group bitmaps,
which means the worst case failure is some blocks are not available
for reallocation.  It works by taking a snapshot, which is a feature
that allows modification of the FS while the bgfsck's idea of the FS
remains unchanged.  Then it goes through the bitmaps, verifying that
the blocks it thinks are allocated are in fact allocated by files
within the snapshot.  Basically, it's only job is really to clear
bits in the bitmap that represent blocks for which there are no files
referencing them.

There are situations where bgfsck can fail, sometimes catastrophically,
but they are unrelated to having dirty blocks in memory for which no
updates have been created.

-- Terry

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