> Soft Updates use magically delicious write ordering to provide the same
kind of
> metadata integrity protection as a journaling filesystem, but without any
> changes to the underlying filesystem structure. Soft Update support is
pretty
> stable in OpenBSD 2.8. As long as

With the greatest of respect, let me refer the gentlemen to the word
"bollocks".

Sorry, I felt like being frivolous. In reality, softupdates to not provide
the most important part of a journaling file system, next to ordered writes,
and that is zero-integrity checking at boot.

One of the major benefits, especially as file systems are getting into the
terabyte ranges now, is that if there is some catastophic failure (outside
the file system code) like power or memory fault, then the file system will
come back clean very quickly - with a log of the writes that can be applied
in order *if* they are marked as complete.

Maybe I am misunderstanding journaling file systems, but those are the two
features that I expect to see (fast writes and not fsck).

Peter

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