# Soft-updates



## woodson2 (Jun 24, 2009)

Can someone tell me why soft-updates doesn't seem to be enabled by default on the / filesystem?


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## DutchDaemon (Jun 24, 2009)

I'm guessing that the / filesystem is considered too static (close to zero metadata updates) for softupdates to have any advantage.


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## SirDice (Jun 24, 2009)

It's a somewhat safer option.



> There are two downsides to Soft Updates that you should be aware of: First, Soft Updates guarantees filesystem consistency in the case of a crash but could very easily be several seconds (even a minute!) behind updating the physical disk. If your system crashes you may lose more work than otherwise. Secondly, Soft Updates delays the freeing of filesystem blocks. If you have a filesystem (such as the root filesystem) which is almost full, performing a major update, such as make installworld, can cause the filesystem to run out of space and the update to fail.


http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/configtuning-disk.html

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/faq/disks.html#SAFE-SOFTUPDATES


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## woodson2 (Jun 24, 2009)

Thanks to the both of you.....long version and short version ...


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