Has any thought been given to exposing some sort of transactional API for ZFS at the user level (even if just consolidation private)?
Just recently, it would seem a poorly timed unscheduled poweroff while NWAM was attempting to update nsswitch.conf left me with a 0 byte nsswitch.conf (which when the system came back up, had rather unpleasant results). While not on opensolaris (though I suspect the problem exists there), I've also encountered instances where a shutdown while the ldap_client process is in the middle of updating /var/ldap/ldap_client_file has left the file empty. In both instances, additional outages were incurred while things had to be recovered manually. And in both instances, code could be added to each utility to try to recover from such a situation. An easier (and would seem more elegant) solution would be for both utilities to simply be able to mark the 'truncate; write new data' sequence as atomic, which is possible with zfs. It's possible other utilities could benefit as well (and would prevent them from all having to implement recovery mechanisms when transitioning data files from one state to another). _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
