On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 06:48:35PM +0000, Neil A. Carson wrote:
> Can't you just moyunt the Linux FS synchronously? In the latest kernels
> I"m pretty sure that behaviour is there. I don't know if it will help save
> your mail or not, though. And people whilttle too much about performance
> to make this the default mount option which is IMHO stupid.

I think it will help, yes. The problem is that this is *synchronous*, it's
not the same a the semi-synchronous which is the default in *BSD (it's the
equivalent of 'mount -o sync' for *BSD). I had a linux box setup this way
and performances were about 1/6 of NetBSD on the same hardware (dual-boot).

What's needed here is not a synchronous filesystem but ordered writes.
*BSD's semi-synchronous is one way to have it, there are other solutions
(e.g. softdep) which combine async speed and semi-synchronous reliability.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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