freebsd-dev

History

Kirk McKusick 0db138a6b0 Only the most recent snapshot contains the complete list of blocks that were copied in all of the earlier snapshots, thus its precomputed list must be used in the copyonwrite test. Using incomplete lists may lead to deadlock. Also do not include the blocks used for the indirect pointers in the indirect pointers as this may lead to inconsistent snapshots. Sponsored by: DARPA & NAI Labs. Approved by: re		2002-12-14 01:36:59 +00:00
..
ffs_alloc.c	More tightly verify the preference returned for the new inode.	2002-12-06 02:08:46 +00:00
ffs_balloc.c	This update is a performance improvement when allocating blocks on	2002-10-22 01:14:25 +00:00
ffs_extern.h	Introduce typedefs for the member functions of struct vfsops and employ	2002-08-13 10:05:50 +00:00
ffs_inode.c	- Convert locks to use standard macros.	2002-09-25 02:49:48 +00:00
ffs_snapshot.c	Only the most recent snapshot contains the complete list of blocks	2002-12-14 01:36:59 +00:00
ffs_softdep_stub.c	Add a missing argument to the stub for softdep_setup_freeblocks.	2002-07-20 04:07:15 +00:00
ffs_softdep.c	The target for the maximum number of dependencies has been cut	2002-11-20 05:16:11 +00:00
ffs_subr.c	I forgot this bit of uglyness in the fsck_ffs cleanup.	2002-07-31 07:01:18 +00:00
ffs_tables.c	This commit adds basic support for the UFS2 filesystem. The UFS2	2002-06-21 06:18:05 +00:00
ffs_vfsops.c	Add a check to disable the previous patch so that future filesystems	2002-11-30 19:04:57 +00:00
ffs_vnops.c	Fix a file-rewrite performance case for UFS[2]. When rewriting portions	2002-10-18 22:52:41 +00:00
fs.h	Create a new 32-bit fs_flags word in the superblock. Add code to move	2002-11-27 02:18:58 +00:00
README.snapshot	Remove the comment about dump(8) not working properly with snapshots.	2002-12-12 00:31:45 +00:00
README.softupdates	Update to reflect current status.	2000-07-08 02:31:21 +00:00
softdep.h	Add support to UFS2 to provide storage for extended attributes.	2002-07-19 07:29:39 +00:00

README.softupdates

$FreeBSD$

Using Soft Updates

To enable the soft updates feature in your kernel, add option
SOFTUPDATES to your kernel configuration.

Once you are running a kernel with soft update support, you need to enable
it for whichever filesystems you wish to run with the soft update policy.
This is done with the -n option to tunefs(8) on the UNMOUNTED filesystems,
e.g. from single-user mode you'd do something like:

	tunefs -n enable /usr

To permanently enable soft updates on the /usr filesystem (or at least
until a corresponding ``tunefs -n disable'' is done).


Soft Updates Copyright Restrictions

As of June 2000 the restrictive copyright has been removed and 
replaced with a `Berkeley-style' copyright. The files implementing
soft updates now reside in the sys/ufs/ffs directory and are
compiled into the generic kernel by default.


Soft Updates Status

The soft updates code has been running in production on many
systems for the past two years generally quite successfully.
The two current sets of shortcomings are:

1) On filesystems that are chronically full, the two minute lag
   from the time a file is deleted until its free space shows up
   will result in premature filesystem full failures. This
   failure mode is most evident in small filesystems such as
   the root. For this reason, use of soft updates is not
   recommended on the root filesystem.

2) If your system routines runs parallel processes each of which
   remove many files, the kernel memory rate limiting code may
   not be able to slow removal operations to a level sustainable
   by the disk subsystem. The result is that the kernel runs out
   of memory and hangs.

Both of these problems are being addressed, but have not yet
been resolved. There are no other known problems at this time.


How Soft Updates Work

For more general information on soft updates, please see:
	http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/
	http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/CSE-TR-254-95/

--
Marshall Kirk McKusick <mckusick@mckusick.com>
July 2000