Background fsck

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 11:25 AM -0800 1/19/04, Chris Pressey wrote:
My own opinion is that the "speed-up-recovery-after-a-crash" thing,
while apparently a very sexy problem for filesystem programmers to
tackle, is going to become more and more of a non-problem as UPS's
become more and more consumer-friendly.
Like, if I can get one of these:

  http://www.outletpc.com/c5401.html

for $20US, and if it gives me enough time to sync everything to
disc before the power really goes out, then my HDDs will rarely
power down in an inconsistent state anyway, yes?
I have had three UPS's die on me once -- in the space of less than
two months.  This included a $1,000 UPS, and two cheaper UPS's.  I
doubt the $20 UPS is going to be more reliable than the ones I have
seen die.  So, given the dramatic increase in hard-disk sizes, I am
still interested in the *goal* of faster recovery after a crash.
Also note that the 'fsck' is done after any kind of system crash,
not just a "we lost power" system crash.  Thus you can run into the
delay of a startup fsck even if you never lose power.
(that said, I must admit that I still run my freebsd boxes with
background_fsck="NO" , because I'm still not comfortable enough
with it...).
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at xxxxxxx