fsck, soft-updates, and snapshots

[Nikos Vassiliadis]

On Tuesday 13 March 2007 05:52, David Cecil wrote:
> Can anyone tell me src/sys/ufs/ffs/README.softupdates and 
> README.snapshots are up to date?  The former is dated June 2000, so it's 
> almost 7 years old.  The snapshots readme is only 2 years younger and 
> mentions the code being alpha-test.
> 

I can answer indirectly. sysinstall, the default FreeBSD installer,
enables soft-updates by default on every filesystem, except the root
filesystem. I think this is true since the 4.x days. This must make
them pretty well tested.

I do not the exact status of snapshots. Perhaps you should ask freebsd-fs.
I know some problems regarding snapshots are now resolved.

> The problems I'm seeing in 6.1 are:
> 1. After writing a lot if data/files to a filesystem with soft-updates 
> enabled, then unmounting or remounting it:
> update error: /: blocks <n> files <y>
> It appears others have seen this too.  It appears that an attempt to 
> flush the buffers to disk as part of the unmount failed.  Is this a 
> known issue?
> 

Could you describe how to reproduce the error?
That would be really useful.

HTH, Nikos