On 15 Jan 2002, at 5:42, Collins Richey boldly uttered: > FreeBSD uses the UFS (unix file system) which is not a journaling file > system. fsck is required if not cleanly unmounted. There is a > feature called Soft Updates that changes the way meta data vs. normal > data is scheduled to be flushed to the disk. This is supposed to make > the file system less error prone, but there are some indications of it > worsening the problem. FreeBSD 5.0 is working on changes to the file > system to allow "fsck-less boot," but I don't know anything more. The > lack of a journaling fs is probably the biggest drawback that I can > see for FreeBSD, with device support being a close second.
For an excellent technical paper on filesystems including comparisons between the FreeBSD Softupdates system and some journaling filesystems, see the links below. Excerpt from the abstract: > Soft Updates holds the promise of providing stronger reliability > guarantees than journaling, with faster recovery and superior > performance in certain boundary cases. abstract: http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/usenix2000_abs.html Postscript full paper: http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/usenix2000.ps There is also a new feature of the FreeBSD filesystem that dramatically increases performance for certain file writes, I believe it is starting to be merged into the base system in 4.5, due out later this month. Phil -- Philip J. Koenig [EMAIL PROTECTED] Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
