From: Keith Matthews (no email)
Date: Mon Oct 15 2001 - 08:40:46 EDT
While this is not strictly a postfix issue it is something that mail
admins will probably want to know about. Those who follow kernel
traffic will already know.
There was a question posted to the Linux-kernel list recently about
journalling filesystems. Most of it is of no relevance here, but a
response from Alan Cox pointed out that some of the problems had been
traced to problems in the ATA interface spec (it had actually shown up
on some IBM discs but was not IBM specific).
The essence of it was that it had been legal in the spec for hardware
cache flush to be a no-op or not implemented (that is the cache in
the disc itself). The most recent revision of the ATA spec has
corrected this.
It was also reported that some IBM laptop drives were not writing the
disc cache back on shutdown/suspend and this was also the cause of
some troubles. Some of the Sony Vaio models apparantly suffer from
this.
While most busy sites will be using SCSI, the use of cheap RAID setups
built of IDE drives is increasing and could show up this problem.
It backs up Weitse's remarks about 'real hardware'.
To misquote Disraeli - ' a matter of lies, damn lies and interface
specs'.
-- Keith Matthews Spam trap - my real account at this node is keith_m Frequentous Consultants - Linux Services, Oracle development & database administration - To unsubscribe, send mail to with content (not subject): unsubscribe postfix-users
|
|
|