Re: fsck takes very long after crash/reset

[Heinrich Rebehn]

Bill Moran wrote:

Heinrich Rebehn wrote:

Bill Moran wrote:

Heinrich Rebehn wrote:

Hi list,

I operate a FreeBSD server with a 300GB Raid. This morning i had to hard reset it and when booting, fsck took some 20 minutes.

I would expect that from 300G

Most partitions, especially the large ones are mounted with soft-updates.

Good.

Also, some weeks ago, we had missing files after a crash/fsck.

Soft-updates will do that if the system crashes in the middle of
writes.

I have read several times that soft updates ensure that the fs is always in a consistent state?

As I understand it, it is consistent.  It's just consistent with the
way the filesystem was prior to those files being saved.

According to murphy's law this happens when the system is needed most urgently. fsck times of 20 minutes are not tolerable then.

Yeah ... isn't Murphy's law a bitch.

This is the point where people talk about journalling fs, and i think they're right.

Did you search the archives as I suggested?  There was a lot of useful
information in some of the past discussions.

I have searched freebsd-qustions, but the only info regarding fsck times was that fsck will be made in bg with 5.0

Running fsck in the background might help when 5.0 becomes stable. If it really works, ok, otherwise i really think a journalling fs is needed.

I think journalling is a good idea anyway.  Although it's not the solution
to every problem, journalling has some advantages that softupdates doesn't.
It would be nice if both were available.  Are you volunteering, because I
seem to remember the conversation that nobody has had the time to port
something like Reiser to FreeBSD yet.

I'm afraid not. I have very little experience with C programming (more FORTRAN, PASCAL, ASSEMBLER, MODULA, ADA). Also i'm not at all familiar w/ the internals of FreeBSD. Time would also be a problem, but not the biggest. Are the filesystem APIs of Linux and FreeBSD so much different? (Probably a silly question :-))

Heinrich




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