Bug#760169: partman-ufs: enable soft-updates
Package: src:partman-ufs
Version: 18
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-bsd@lists.debian.org
User: debian-bsd@lists.debian.org
Usertags: kfreebsd
Hi,
I propose that, as we discussed last year, we might enable soft-updates
for newly-created kfreebsd UFS filesystems. partman-ufs is now
kfreebsd-any so this change wouldn't affect other architectures.
There can be huge performance increases from doing this if syncing
metadata updates to disk is slow, like: flash drives, USB drives,
network-attached drives (the latter doesn't apply really to kfreebsd
itself, but maybe is true of underlying cloud infrastructure).
(I should say, our UFS is basically at the level of unjournalled ext2
performance right now, and this would be like jumping to ext3).
FreeBSD 9 or earlier has been using soft-updates in their default
installs, for all except the root filesystem...
On 24/06/13 16:14, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
> I think it was general conservatism, and is no longer the case anyway.
[... that the root filesystem didn't also use it].
Still, I propose we initially adopt this with similar conservatism and
apply the change only for UFS filesystems mounted elsewhere than / and
/boot.
We lack the initscripts to run a special background fsck that recovers
'partly deleted' (deleted before a crash) disk blocks as free space. I
don't think it's essential to have that in place; in the very unlikely
event someone runs out of space due to this, an administrator could
perhaps run the tool manually.
Soft-updates are not the only way of doing this (there is now gjournal
and such), but I suggest this method initially because it was the
upstream default for some time, and because I've used it myself on
kfreebsd partitions for many months.
Regards,
--
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org
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