At 6:21 PM -0800 2005-03-25, John W. Baxter wrote:
Unless softupdates "sees" power outages and hustles the data onto disk (which is probably feasible) it would not be considered MTA-suitable (and Exim does what it can to prevent it, using whatever force to disk calls are available to it).
The problem is that with modern disks not flushing cache data even when they're told to do so, it's virtually impossible to guarantee that the data is written before you've lost power. You're completely at the mercy of the hardware, and modern caches these days are easily large enough to hold a large number of small files.
The typical Linux method of using async mounts fairly frequently results in filesystem corruption which needs to be corrected with fsck, and that can take a long time with a large filesystem. Yes, journaling can ameliorate that problem to a degree, but you still need to turn off the async mount if you want as much as they can give you in terms of "full protection".
Softupdates makes sure that the filesystem on disk is always in a consistent state, and while a few files/messages may be lost in a power outage, the filesystem itself is okay and shouldn't ever need to fsck. Given the modern world we live in and the realities we have to deal with, I think that's a pretty good trade-off.
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