[Oliver_H]

I suspect that most people who read this blog are familiar with journaling as a mechanism for ensuring post-crash filesystem consistency. Some of you may also be familiar with copy-on-write and log structured filesystems as an alternative to journaling. BSD's ffs, an extension of the original unix filesystem, has used an alternate approach called soft-updates to handle filesystem consistency for around 10 years. For the past few months, I have been creating a hybrid journaled softupdate system to deal with inadequacies in the existing softdep system. This work is opensource and will be available to FreeBSD-current users sometime this month. Behind the cut I briefly describe the tradeoffs in each consistency mechanism and motivation for this work.

jeffr