FreeBSD 5.3 file system troubles

[Kris Kennaway]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 03:53:46PM -0700, Terry R. Friedrichsen wrote:
> I wrote:
> 
> >> try running something that works the file system and simply turn off the
> >> system power in the middle of it.
> 
> to which kris at obsecurity.org replied:
> 
> > This is expected if you don't turn off write caching of the hard
> > disks.  It breaks the softupdates consistency model because data
> > written to the disk may not actually be written to the disk, so it's
> > not there following an unexpected power cycle.  Unfortunately write
> > caching causes a performance hit, and there was a large user backlash
> > when it was briefly enabled by default some years ago.
> 
> What you say is true, but what I'm observing is far worse than simply
> missing the last few blocks of output files, etc.
> 
> The last time I had to power-cycle the Alpha box (because Xorg hung it),
> it rebooted to single-user mode but I couldn't even run "sh" because
> some file in lib was missing.  Or if I *do* get into "sh" to run fsck,
> it finds *hundreds and hundreds* of problems ...

Some disks are also known to go crazy and scribble everywhere when
they lose power.

Kris
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20050126/7068f14c/attachment.bin