OpenBSD 7.8

What is the status on FS journaling/softupdates? I used to like openBSD but it kind of disappeared of my life once they removed support for softupdates a couple of years ago. I am not so fond of those fsck and lost data we used to have on an occasional basis after an unexpected hard shutdown due to a power cut in the 90's.

Are they any new FS supported nowadays?

Softupdates was never an approach towards journaling. It was removed because it caused more problems than it solved and because its complexity stood in the way of future work to improve FFS2.

AFAIK there's currently no news about plans on getting journaling into FFS2 or bringing one of the other modern file systems onboard. The most "modern" choices you have on OpenBSD is FFS2 and ext3 (supported through OpenBSD's ext2 driver but without journaling).

My own experience with FFS/FFS2 the past 20 or so years is that it's been wholly robust through the relatively few power outages and other incidents I've had. While I wouldn't mind it becoming snappier I do prefer that its fully synchronous. I've never used softupdates.

> I am not so fond of those fsck and lost data we used to have on an occasional basis after an unexpected hard shutdown due to a power cut in the 90's.

Yup, still the case today.

Currently with an SSD, when there’s a power cut, there’s about a 20% chance my router will require me to walk downstairs and plug in a keyboard, type “fsck” manually and press y at all the prompts.

I haven’t actually had any issues with noticeable data loss though.

I’d settle for a default “boot anyway, press y for all fsck questions” mode on boot. I just don’t want to have to physically touch the thing.

There is a hammer2fs port for openbsd that is actively maintained

https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2

Somehow it was just never taken over the finish line though. I don't know why.

>Softupdates was never an approach towards journaling.

Ehmm it is a alternative approach for fs consistency then journaling:

>>The use of soft updates obviates the need for a separate log or for most synchronous writes.

https://www.mckusick.com/softdep/

> Currently with an SSD, when there’s a power cut, there’s about a 20% chance my router will require me to walk downstairs and plug in a keyboard, type “fsck” manually and press y at all the prompts.

> I’d settle for a default “boot anyway, press y for all fsck questions” mode on boot. I just don’t want to have to physically touch the thing.

Look up where fsck is run in /etc/rc and add the -y there.

It is a router, not a file server. Add the sync flag to fstab.

FFS/FFS2 has been reliable for me, but unfortunately don’t have reliable power. It does frequently require fsck -y on boot. It’s not the most pleasant with my headless units requiring a serial cable.

My solution has been a huge UPS so they never turn off. Softupdates prevented this issue for over a decade (?), so hoping we get HAMMER2 or something down the road.

I’ve been running OpenBSD continuously since 3.4, and no other OS beats it in simplicity IMO. The upgrades have ticked along quickly and flawlessly year over year. I wish more systems would take a page out of that book and implement something like sysupgrade.

Can anyone expect booting from it?