David Schultz wrote: > Thus spake Terry Lambert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > In other words, if it would have worked with soft updates turned > > off, then it will work with soft updates turned on. > > My point was that a busy disk that is nearly 100% full will > probably experience intermitted ``disk full'' errors anyway, > so it suffices to simply deal with cases such as > 'rm -rf foo && immediately create lots more files', which > softupdates does handle in -CURRENT.
I think the problem that was specifically mentioned, with regard to / (after a lot of assumptions) was a file replacement which had to delete an old file and make room for a new one. I do this all the time, by replacing the kernel and all modules, and keeping "one behind", e.g. rm x.old; mv x x.old; cp blah x. This fails on a soft updates system because the deletion is not actually done to the point of the space having been recovered, before the copies are started. > > IMO, this is not the reason for them being off on /; the real > > reason is as I've stated: sysinstall expects the common case to > > be an initial install, not operations after the initial install, > > and so does not turn it on by default. > > The original reason was due to the possibility of installworld > failing, due to the case described above not being handled > particularly well in FreeBSD 4.X. Sysinstall is perfectly happy > with creating a root FS with softupdates enabled. If someone > wants to bother changing the default for what little difference it > might make in installworld/installkernel times, I would support it. Eh. I don't think it's that useful, but sysinstall in any mode other than "create the FS in the first place/new install" is not really going to have a lot of opportunity to do that bit flip. The most common way I use sysinstall is to NFS mount a CDROM image off some machine, get the sysinstall image that matches the CDROM image, and copy it to /tmp (this is a bitch; the sysinstall image should be made available by itself on distribution CDROMs; as it is, you have to vnconfig, copy a file off it, and vnconfig again, and copy a file off that, to get the sysinstall program). It's about the only way you can upgrade a rackmount machine with a serial console and no floppy or CDROM drive on it (you need a non-serial console to use the Intel PXE crap to netboot). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
