SV1K reliability (summary)

[Paul de Bra]

In article <7454 at suns302.cel.co.uk> ir at cel.co.uk (ian reid) writes:
>In brief the question was why did my system lose files when a power loss
>occurred.  I can accept I would lose files which were being modified at the
>time, but I was losing (or having corrupted) some indeterminate files
>which made my system unbootable....

I have been running AT&T sVr3.2u for well over a year now and never
ever lost files after a power-fail or panic (the panics were because i had
a bad block in the swap space, not because of bugs in the os).
This experience is with both the 1K and 2K file systems.
There is a process which updates the disk in a more continuous fashion than
the old /etc/update did.

I have experimented with sVr4.0 version 2.0 and can only say that the
ufs file system is horribly unreliable. Shortly after reading about
100 mbytes from a tape (but well after the time the automatic update
program waits to write the stuff out to the disk) I got a panic,
and fsck went on and on complaining about my file systems...
I went back to sVr3.2.
Apparently the sVr4.0 ufs file system doesn't get sync-ed properly
by the automatic syncing deamon...

Paul.
(debra at research.att.com, debra at win.tue.nl)