Sysinstall automatic filesystem size generation.

[Matthias Buelow]

Chuck Swiger wrote:

>PS: Haven't we had this conversation before?

Yes, indeed, and I don't want to reopen that issue since that would
lead to no new insights (and since I don't have the time atm. to
contribute anything I couldn't provide any stuff myself).  I was
just refuting the claim of "very robust" filesystem when power goes
out in the context of 200GB consumer-grade hardware that this thread
was talking about. I think until a satisfactory solution can be
found (by making softupdates and/or a journalled filesystem as
reliable as possible through mechanisms like write-request barriers
and appropriate flushing at these) users who're running FreeBSD on
end-consumer hardware (desktop PC as workstation or personal server)
should be warned that softupdates does NOT work as described on
their hardware and that the filesystem can easily be corrupted when
the power goes out, no matter if softupdates is enabled or not.

One often sees the "softupdates" argument being fielded by FreeBSD
advocates, typically against Linux users with journalled fs, on web
forums, usenet and other less authoritative (and knowledgable)
places of discussion, and it is often presented as if it were some
kind of magic bullet that makes filesystem corruption impossible.
This simply is not so.

mkb.