Re: xfs, reiserfs, ext2 and sync directory updates
On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Craig Sanders wrote:
[snip]
> freebsd's filesystem has a neat feature called 'soft-updates' which
> does this right. writing files on a fs mounted with soft-updates is
> asynchronous and fast, but directory entry updates are synchronous
> (safer but slower). a good balance between speed and safety, and ideal
> for a mail queue or Maildir/ spool. it would be nice to see something
> like this in linux.
Indeed, Postfix and Sendmail would both jump on this like ...
> the workaround for postfix is to use 'chattr +S' to set the postfix
> queue directories to be sync write. this is safe, but has the
> unfortunate side-effect of making all the *files* in the queue
> directories also sync-write...which hurts performance quite badly.
Gads, my mind is failing quickly... there was recently a thread in lkml
about this exact problem, and Tso(iirc) talked about the possibilities
of synchronous directory writes - didn't get much attention (I found it
after the fact and never got a reply to him) ;-{
Maybe 'tis time to start the discussion again ?
--
Rick Nelson
> : Any porters out there should feel happier knowing that DEC is shipping
> : me an AlphaPC that I intend to try getting linux running on: this will
> : definitely help flush out some of the most flagrant unportable stuff.
> : The Alpha is much more different from the i386 than the 68k stuff is, so
> : it's likely to get most of the stuff fixed.
>
> It's posts like this that almost convince us non-believers that there
> really is a god.
-- Anthony Lovell, to Linus's remarks about porting
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