Re: Background fsck

[Garance A Drosihn <drosih@xxxxxxx>]

At 11:25 AM -0800 1/19/04, Chris Pressey wrote:
> My own opinion is that the "speed-up-recovery-after-a-crash" thing,
> while apparently a very sexy problem for filesystem programmers to
> tackle, is going to become more and more of a non-problem as UPS's
> become more and more consumer-friendly.
>
> Like, if I can get one of these:
>
>   http://www.outletpc.com/c5401.html
>
> for $20US, and if it gives me enough time to sync everything to
> disc before the power really goes out, then my HDDs will rarely
> power down in an inconsistent state anyway, yes?

I have had three UPS's die on me once -- in the space of less than
two months.  This included a $1,000 UPS, and two cheaper UPS's.  I
doubt the $20 UPS is going to be more reliable than the ones I have
seen die.  So, given the dramatic increase in hard-disk sizes, I am
still interested in the *goal* of faster recovery after a crash.

Also note that the 'fsck' is done after any kind of system crash,
not just a "we lost power" system crash.  Thus you can run into the
delay of a startup fsck even if you never lose power.

(that said, I must admit that I still run my freebsd boxes with
background_fsck="NO" , because I'm still not comfortable enough
with it...).

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx