QMail and SoftUpdates
Nikita Danilov
Nikita at Namesys.COM
Mon May 17 10:56:17 PDT 2004
Xin LI writes:
> On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 01:18:15PM -0400, Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> > The link at
> >
> > http://cr.yp.to/qmail/faq/reliability.html#filesystems
> >
> > claims, using SoftUpdates for mailqueue is dangerous. Is that still
> > true? Thanks!
>
> Yes, it is dangerous. Same is true for any journalling file systems,
> which essentially does the same thing: delayed write of data/metadata.
>
> Delayed write will make it possible for the Operating System to group
> several writes together and write them once, or at least, in a better
> order in order to improve performance. However, for the mail case, once
> it responds "250", then the remote peer is allowed to remove the message
> from its queue. If the system crashes, and the data was not written into
> disk, then your message is lost.
Unless mail-server did fsync(2) which is guaranteed to return only after
data reached stable storage. If file-system doesn't provide such
guarantee it's broken, if mail server doesn't call fsync, or
fdatasync---it is. Even without any journalling involved.
Nikita.
More information about the freebsd-fs
mailing list