On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Chuck Youse wrote:
> One of the biggest reasons for the difference: FreeBSD, by default,
> performs _synchronous_ metadata updates, and Linux performs asynchronous
> metadata updates.
>
> It's definitely a bit slower, but the payoff is in reliability. I have
> seen more than one [production!] Linux machine completely trash its
> filesystems because the implementors decided that their "NT-killer" must
> have good performance at the expense of serious, production-quality
> reliability.
To put it slightly more strongly: as far as I'm concerned ext2 is not a
serious fs if you really care about handling power failures and other such
fun things. In clusters as small as 64 machines I've measured a 5%
probability that after a power failure one of the 64 ext2 file systems
will have a trashed root file system. With freebsd, over a four-year span,
running through lots of power outages, I didn't lose an FFS file system
even *once* (except for the disk that burned up, but not even FFS can fix
that one).
ext2 needs a lot of help. Evidently it will be getting it soon, though.
ron
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