Re: Instability with NetBSD Dom0

[tg%gmplib.org@localhost (Torbjörn Granlund)]

Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost> writes:

  I'm not sure why you want to experiment :-) Seriously, on a production
  machine, I would recommend just making all files used for vnd
  non-sparse.  (If you want to grab another box to experiment on a home to
  fix the bug, great, but I would decouple that from your production
  setup.)
  
Well, you misunderstand.  :-)

I am all for a robust production machine...  Now it is not robust, and I
would like to understand why it is not robust.  Determining the envelope
of the bug helps; I will then intelligently choose life outside of said
envelope.

A nice side-effect is doing a contribution to making NetBSD better.

  Another reason not to use sparse files is that creating files non-sparse
  gets you pretty good locality of block allocation and I think this leads
  to higher efficiency, but I don't have test data.
  
I think this is true for rust disks, less so for SSDs (at least if you
remember to coax the NetBSD installer into not misaligning all
partitions...).

  So I'd just copy each image file with dd, and then rm the old one and
  rename.  As in just:
  
    dd if=image of=image.new bs=1m
    mv image image.sparse
    mv image.new image
  
  and then delete image.sparse when you are confident.
  
Thanks, I'll revert to using dd'ed images for critical machines!

-- 
Torbjörn
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